Dog Days
by William Easley
Summary: Wendy and Dipper and the gang are hoping to enjoy some cool experiences during the hottest weeks of July and August, 2016. Only a stranger-a stray dog with some paranormal gifts-appears to complicate matters. Probably there will be Wendip.
1. Chapter 1

_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them._

* * *

 **Dog Days**

 **(July-August 2016)**

* * *

 **1: Work to Be Done**

With Dipper's help—and he became a great help as the days went on—Wendy succeeded in laying in a full winter's supply of firewood for the Shack by midday on Monday, July 25. The last step of all was ferrying the three cords of firewood—not a one-trip deal!—from her dad's lumber mill over to the Mystery Shack, offloading it, and stacking it on three simple frames knocked together from 2 x 4's.

These, by the way, were cast-offs from the mill—irregular, or too knotty in the wrong places, or a little bit warped, this and that. At any rate, Wendy and Dipper had built the frames together, each one nine feet long, three and a half feet wide, and four feet tall—just right to accommodate one cord of wood each. Four parallel rails running the length of the frame bases kept the firewood elevated above the ground, so it would dry quicker.

The two teens started the hauling after the Shack closed on Friday and managed two truckloads—about half a cord. Most of it was oak, with its distinctive, sour aroma, but they finished with a truckload of apple, which smelled tangy and nearly sweet. Then Sunday afternoon they did another cord and a half, more oak and some Douglas fir. The fir smelled best of all, Dipper thought, like balsam and with a distinct touch of tangerine. Wendy laughed when she caught him sniffing it. "Be careful," she teased. "I think that may be what got my dad hooked on logging!"

Finally Monday they had just one mixed cord, or four trips in the big pickup Wendy had borrowed from Dan, to worry about. It was pleasant, working together, but the hauling and toting and stacking were brute labor, gradually tiring even Wendy, who joked that she was normally lazy because she had to save up her energy for jobs like this one.

"You know," Dipper said, sweating as they offloaded and stacked the last pickup cargo of Douglas fir, "if I did this every day, I'd get in good shape!"

"Yeah, it's a great workout," Wendy agreed. "Better if you get paid for it, like Dad does, though!"

At noon, shucking off the thick leather gloves and wiping his face with a red bandana—hey, why not affect a logger's garb, since he was doing logger's work—Dipper looked at the three enormous stacks of firewood and felt a little glow of pride. "That ought to keep the Ramirezes warm all winter," he said.

Wendy was wearing blue denim overalls over her normal flannel shirt, and she'd tied a sweat band around her forehead. She took off her own gloves, stuffed them in the pocket of the overalls, and nodded her agreement. "Yep. And the logs'll be good and seasoned by December or January. OK, review time. If it should come on to rain, what do you do?"

"Cover each stack with a tarp and tie the tarp down to the hooks we screwed in," Dipper said. "And after the rain, take the tarp off."

"Right," Wendy said, grinning. "And when can you leave the tarp on permanently?"

"Soos will use the moisture meter to check the wood," Dipper said. "He'll read samples from the top row, middle rows, and bottom row of each stack. When all the readings are down to twenty per cent or lower, that's the time to put the tarps on permanently. How did I do?"

"Got an A," Wendy said, throwing her arm over his shoulder. "Whoo! Your shirt's soaking with sweat, Dip! Let's take a shower, have lunch, and then you can ride over with me to Casa Catastrophe to trade out vehicles. We got a lot of daylight left, and now we can do something fun."

"Oh?" Dipper asked, smiling. He expected they'd go out to the lake—the day was heating up, already at ninety by noon, and he was practicing swimming whenever he could and getting better at it. And he was always ready to hang out with his girlfriend when she wore one of her red bathing suits.

However, over lunch Wendy told him had a different idea in mind. "The NoGo GPS tracker I ordered came in on Saturday. You can help me install it in the Green Machine."

"Oh." Considerably less enthusiasm that time, although Dipper knew how important it was. Wendy's car, though it was very old, had been stolen when they'd driven over to Portland early in the month. The NoGo was a way Wendy and the police could use to quickly track down the 1973 Dodge Dart if it should ever be stolen again—and it might be, because Wendy had restored it to collector's standards, and some people would offer her upwards of thirty thousand for it. However, it was her first car, she'd invested her sweat in it, she'd learned every nut and bolt of it, and she meant to hang onto it.

The GPS was one way of helping her hang on, even if some bad dudes tried to rustle it. Wendy also was planning to install a kill switch, so no one could easily hotwire the car again. All that cost money, but she had invested literally years in getting the car in top shape, and she wasn't about to risk it again.

"Won't be too hard, man," Wendy said after lunch as they cleaned up their dishes. "Not gonna put in the kill switch today, just the GPS tracker. Couple hours, and then maybe we can take in a movie or something."

Mondays were their days off from work, and generally they did something in the afternoons or evenings—a movie, bowling (not Dipper's favorite sport, but it helped that Wendy was his favorite girl), or, rarely, hanging with some of Wendy's old posse when they were in town.

Thompson and Vanilla were now a serious item, though, talking marriage, and he was working as full-time manager of the movie theater, while she was in junior college, including summer school. The two of them didn't have a lot of spare time.

Lee and Nate had both moved out of town, going off to college, Lee to Reed in Portland, Nate to Clemeteka in Salem. Sometimes they were in town, but mostly not, and rarely ever together.

And Robbie and Tambry by now were almost an old married couple, he enrolled in Oregon State with a music major and a business minor, she at the same university enrolled in a degree program to become a junior-high teacher. Robbie still fronted Robbie V and the Tombstones, and the group had two albums out, which had both sold respectably, and they spent their summers touring the Pacific coast, from San Diego to Vancouver and points in between.

Tambry still found time to text Wendy about three or four times a week, often sending photos from gigs. The Tombstones had just moved from opening for bigger acts to _being_ the bigger act, and one of the songs that probably would be a main feature on their next album—"Don't Think So," a sour and cynical ballad, sung in a deceptively sexy and soft tone, about how love stinks—that featured Tambry's vocals had broken into the top twenty for metal music. Nice, and Tambry was still her chatty old self when she texted or called, but—not the same as a visit.

As for Dipper—well, he always had found making friends difficult. Most of his good friends in Gravity Falls were older, or of different species. The townspeople wouldn't panic if Dipper and, say, a young Manotaur walked into the Arcade—but Manotaurs mostly found the town boring, except for the occasional hot-weather shower under a broken fire hydrant. He and Pacifica were friendly, but Pacifica was serious about a former vampire, so her hanging-out time had become restricted.

So Dipper and Wendy mostly had each other and Mabel and Teek. That was their little gang right now. At lunch, the four of them decided to head out to the mall in the evening, hang out, grab a meal, and maybe catch a movie or look for some other mischief to get into.

Anyway, Wendy and Dipper drove her dad's pickup truck over to the Corduroys' house. Wendy said the alterations to the Dart were just yard mechanics, so they didn't have to visit a garage. Dipper saw that she had repaired the minor damage the Dart had suffered—mainly an extracted entertainment system that had to be rewired and re-mounted, as well as a couple of minor scrapes suffered when the thieves had driven too close to a fence post or something. It was looking shiny and new—or as new as a fifty-plus-year-old car could look.

Wendy unpacked a rear bumper guard, steel tubing with three eight-inch oval rubber cushion pads that sported reflectors, and they installed that. Then she climbed inside the trunk, lying curled up on her side, and did a little creative rewiring from the driver's side tail light.

As she worked, Dipper asked, "Have you tested the GPS?"

"Oh, yeah," she said as she began to sort out the wires. "Rode around with it beside me in the front seat, and it worked perfect. Locates the car to within three meters, advertising said, and it was even closer than that when I checked it."

With Dipper holding a flashlight for her, Wendy carefully drilled a small hole, fed new wires through it, and then installed the boxy little GPS in the driver's-side cushion pad—which inside inch-thick walls of hard rubber held a red plastic reflector, like the other two pads, with no bulb, just the crisscrossed reflecting surface and a silvery backing.

Wendy unscrewed the lens, carved out a square in the flat inch-thick oval of rubber behind it, fitted the GPs in and cemented it in place, and then replaced the reflector. From the trunk side, she wired up the unit, secured the wires inconspicuously with silicone glue, and then put sealant on the hole she had made for the wires.

She and Dipper stepped back ten feet and admired her work. You couldn't tell the GPS was even there, and as Wendy said, if anybody saw the wires and ripped them loose, the GPS would still work for twelve hours on battery power alone.

"There we go!" she said, sounding satisfied. "When the engine's off, if the GPS battery falls under seventy per cent, a trickle charge cuts in until it's fully charged. When I start up, the electricity from the generator will run the GPS and bring the battery up to full charge. It kicks in and starts to send the ping when it senses motion, and now the Green Machine will be easy to find! How'd I do on time?"

"Hour and forty minutes," Dipper said. "It's two forty-five."

"Not too shabby. So now the hard-working mechanics can relax," Wendy said. She grinned wickedly and hip-bumped him. "Or not, whatever you want."

Dan and the boys were off somewhere on a serious logging job, and until six o'clock or so, Wendy and Dipper would have the house to themselves. For a little while they just chilled in the living room, sitting together on the sofa and listening to music. Dipper was at least as tired as he sensed Wendy was—their touching let them share each other's lows as well as highs—and he knew that if they got started, she'd oblige him, but she was pretty much at low ebb physically.

He had this thing. If they started getting, well, you know, handsy and all, he wanted her to enjoy it at least as much as he did. And now she was just a little too far over the weariness horizon to really get into it.

So they didn't make out. Hardly at all. In fact, they didn't even indulge in harmless mental teasing. And physically they did nothing very heated—well, it couldn't be, both of them so tired and the day was already too hot for that—but they enjoyed, in a sleepy way, some snuggling and smooching. And oddly enough for two teens who really loved each other, they simply fell asleep sitting on the sofa, listening to music and holding hands.

And, smiling, they dreamed each other's dreams.

* * *

That same afternoon a half-grown stray dog, chased away from a dumpster by humans and chased out of town by a couple of bigger, rougher dogs found himself atop the rounded grassy hill that overlooked the town. He curled up, hungry, and about the same time that elsewhere Wendy and Dipper dozed off, the dog went to sleep, the sun warm on his fur, the breeze up there on the hilltop keeping him from getting too overheated.

In sleep his stomach didn't cry for food.

And because below him lay an alien spacecraft, and because on his last visit Ford had idly flipped a switch that seemed to do nothing and had neglected to flip it back again, and because the dog happened to nap at the exact spot where a powerful, invisible energy pulsed form the device that Ford had inadvertently engaged, things began to happen. To change in odd ways. Silently.

The alien device burned itself out after a few hours.

The dog woke sometime after that, in the middle part of the night. His stomach ached for food.

And as he bowed and stretched, as waking dogs do, he thought, coherently _: I am a dog. I . . . have no name. What is a name? It is something to be called. It is something a human would call a dog the human liked. A human who likes a dog protects the dog. I need a protector. And I need someone to protect. I . . . am a dog. And I am . . . smart._

If he hadn't been near starvation, he would have marveled more at the mysterious gift, or was it a curse, that had come to him while he slept. But hunger drove him. He got up and in the darkness trotted back to town. He paused to drink at a stream. Then his head came up, nostrils eagerly twitching.

Somewhere not far was food. It was not dog food. It was food for pigs, which he also smelled. The dog changed direction and soon found the spot where two grown pigs had their home near a human building.

He approached tentatively. The pigs woke up. They were not aggressive animals. They grunted sleepily as he edged into their sty. They did not object when the dog finished the scant remnants of their dinner.

They did not object when he lay down next to them, enjoying their warmth, the edge of his hunger barely blunted and far from satisfied.

And the dog thought, _Some human takes good care of these pigs. Made them a place safe from the weather. Gave them food to eat. The pigs have someone._

 _Someone to protect them._

 _Someone I could protect._

The dog did not exactly make plans. But he waited for sleep and then for something that he sensed would happen.


	2. Chapter 2

**Dog Days**

 **(July-August 2016)**

* * *

 **2: Second Chance**

On Tuesday morning, the clinks of plates being set on the table and the aromas of breakfast woke Mabel. She stretched, yawned, rolled out of bed, and reached for her slippers. She was wearing her faded old sleep shirt, the one with the floppy disk emblem, and knee-length pajamas, certainly no less presentable than Stan used to be in his boxers, so she went down the hall and into the dining room without pausing to dress further. Dipper and Wendy, in their running shorts, were just sitting down to pancakes and turkey bacon. "Any more?" Mabel asked hopefully.

"Hi, Mabes," Wendy said. She pointed by twitching her head. "Stack of three pancakes on the stove, still warm. We figured you'd wake up when you heard us. More bacon in there, too."

Mabel made herself a breakfast plate, poured herself a cup of coffee, and joined them. "What time is it?" she asked, reaching for the bottle of Sir Syrup maple-flavored pancake topping.

Dipper glanced over at the clock, saving his sister the trouble of turning her head. "'Bout ten to eight," he said.

Mabel rolled her eyes. "Sheesh! You guys start on your running extra early?" she asked as she glugged about a third of the bottle of syrup on her plate.

Wendy sipped from her coffee. "Little bit. We ran our nature trail for about fifty minutes," she said. "Came back to the Shack oh, twenty minutes ago."

"Gah," Mabel said. "Too much exertion too early in the morning! I'd have thought that hauling all that wood would've been enough exercise for the month for both of you! Can't talk now, eating." She dug into the bacon, cut forkfuls of syrup-drenched, dripping pancakes, and wolfed down the breakfast. "That was good!" she said after about three minutes, hopping up in a livelier way, having stoked her sugar-powered engine. She paused to drain her coffee in three quick gulps. "I'll come back in and help with the dishes in a minute. Gotta check on my pigs first!"

"No, first put some clothes on," Dipper advised her.

She stuck her tongue out at him, though that was exactly what she'd intended to do next. Mabel went back to her room, pulled on yesterday's jeans and sweater—she'd shower before the Shack geared up for breakfast—and without bothering with socks, put on her flats. "Don't do the dishes until I get back!" she said, banging out the door.

She paused on the porch to take a deep, appreciative sniff of the clean, naturally pine-scented air. Mm, it was a nice morning, not exactly cool but fresh, though she thought that today would surely be a hot one. The sky had that slightly yellowish blue tint that promised a day of hard sunshine, one of the sweltering dog days of summer. It was the kind of day that sometimes ushered in a pounding thunderstorm—not nearly as rare here as they were back home in Piedmont, where they happened no more often than three or four times in a year.

Humming a little ("One Dance"), Mabel bopped to the storage shed and filled a bucket with _Diss Little Piggy_ brand pig feed (the Diss family produced the stuff), guaranteed to have all the nutrients needed by pigs. That was Waddles's and Widdles's normal breakfast. In the evenings, they always dined on leftovers.

Mabel hefted the bin of pig feed back in its little closet, hauled the pail of brown pellets out of the shed, and carefully shut and latched the shed door behind her. Once she had forgotten to do that, and her pigs had broken in and, well, pigged out. It was probably bad for them, though Mabel sort of admired the way they'd gone through a two-week supply of food in less than half an hour.

"Waddles!" Mabel called. "Widdles! Mommy's here with breakfast!" She opened the sty gate, paused to run water from a hose into their water trough, and then poured the pig feed pellets into their food trough. She heard them grunting, and in a couple of seconds the two lumbered out of their shelter, blinking in the morning sunlight, and then eagerly trotted into the sty, coming over to nuzzle her before tucking into their food. Mabel laughed and caressed and patted both of them. "Little darlings!"

Darlings they may have been, but they were little only in Mabel's memory—both of them had grown into the hundreds-of-pounds range now. They gruntled happily as side by side they ate their breakfast, and Mabel said, "Sorry I've been preoccupied lately. I'll come play with you today after work. I promised Brobro I'd help with the dishes, and you know what a grumpy-grump he can be when I pledge to do something but don't do it. You guys can ramble around the yard, but be good and don't scare the tourists. And don't go into the woods, because who knows, there might be a big bad, uh . . . wolf?"

Movement in the shelter door had caught her eye, and she saw a tentative brown head peek out fearfully and then quickly draw back. "Hey, you guys have a visitor?" Mabel asked.

She went over to their shelter and stooped to peer in. A small dog crouched on the straw, its eyes wide and bright with fear. Though shivering, it did not growl or bark at her. It was short-haired, with a coat in tones of cream and brown and sharp upright ears, though it flattened them in alarm as she approached. Its head looked like that of a German shepherd, though much smaller.

"Hi," Mabel said softly. "Hey, I won't hurt you. You don't have to be afraid of me." She held her hand out, palm up, and did not look directly at the dog.

She could hear it stirring as it inched forward in the straw. And then she felt its soft, warm tongue lick her hand. Mabel backed away. "Come on out," she coaxed. "You're OK. I'm friendly."

The dog crept out on its belly, and Mabel's tender heart panged as she saw how starkly its ribs stood out. "Poor little thing!"

The puppy—it couldn't have been more than five or six months old—rolled on its back and waved its paws. She reached down and patted its chest. "You must be _starving_. Come with me. Come on! Here, boy!"

She walked to the open gate of the pen. Waddles followed her out, stretching in his piggy way, and then after pausing for a drink Widdles came, too, and apparently the dog decided that any friend of the pigs was his friend, too, because he limped out to Mabel.

"Aw! Are you hurt?" Mabel walked toward the Shack, with the pup following, favoring its right front paw as though footsore.

She sat on the lowest step of the small porch. The dog came right up to her and put its head on her thigh and whimpered. "It's OK now," Mabel said, petting him. "You come inside. I'm gonna take care of you." She stood and opened the door, and the puppy's nose twitched as the aroma of bacon drifted out. "Come on, now."

Trembling, the dog lowered its belly and crept up the steps and inside the Mystery Shack. Mabel gently closed the door as her new friend looked around as though terrified of being inside. "This way."

Dipper and Wendy were clearing the table. "Didn't think you were coming back," Dipper said. "You wash and—whoa, a dog?"

"I think he's a stray," Mabel said. "Can we give him some turkey bacon?"

"Just a couple of pieces left," Wendy said. "I'll get them."

She brought them back. The dog whined, licking his chops. Wendy knelt beside him and gave him one of the two pieces of bacon, which vanished as if by magic as the dog took it from her and ate it. Wendy handed the other strip of bacon to Mabel. "You give him this one."

Mabel sat on the floor and fed the bacon to the pup, who climbed into her lap, tall wagging furiously, as he strained to lick her cheek.

"I think somebody's in love," Dipper said. "Is he sick?"

"I think he's just starving," Wendy said. "Look how skinny he is, the poor little guy! But we ought to take him to the vet to be checked out. No collar?"

"No," Mabel said. She had examined his paw, but saw no obvious cut or sign of injury. "Maybe he's got a chip, though."

Wendy ruffled the dog's neck. "A vet could scan for that. He seems friendly. But I don't think he's ever worn a collar. His neck's so smooth."

Dipper looked at the clock. "Dr. Setter always is in his office early. I'll give him a call."

Dr. Julius Setter was a local veterinarian who normally treated mainly farm animals, goat-sized and up. Dipper looked up the number and called the veterinarian, who answered right away. Quickly, Dipper explained that a stray dog had showed up and looked malnourished and weak.

"Well," the vet said, "normally I'd tell you to take it to Dr. Murtha, but she's booked up right now, and I've been taking her overflow. Can you bring the dog in right away? Say be here about eight-thirty or so? My first appointment's at nine-fifteen, so I can work it in."

"We'll manage that," Dipper said. "How much will the bill be? I mean ballpark?"

"Maybe as much as a hundred," Setter said. "Sounds as if he needs shots, and he surely needs a thorough exam. There'll be some lab fees involved."

"OK," Dipper said.

Abuelita, Soos and Melody, and the kids had just got up, and they came in. Dipper explained that Mabel needed to take the dog in to the vet as Little Soos stared at the puppy, though he seemed a little afraid of touching it. In turn, the dog seemed apprehensive of so many people looking on, too, though he cowered rather than attempting to flee.

"Sure," Soos said. "You can take the morning off, Hambone! We'll manage somehow. But try to be back by eleven if you can, because the lunch crowd is bonkers crazy when we have a busy day."

Mabel agreed. Dipper went up to the attic and, with a little inward sigh, he took seven twenties out of his stash of summer money. Maybe Mabel would remember to repay him, but generally she still lived by a cheerful _su stuff es mi stuff_ philosophy. The car she had named Helen Wheels, for example, belonged to both of them, technically, but Mabel expected Dipper to ask her for permission if he wanted to drive it.

Soos dug out the pet carrier that Waddles had long since outgrown, improvised a pad from three old towels, and then Mabel urged the puppy into it. He whined a little but did not bark or howl. Dipper gave Mabel the cash and told her to bring back the change.

"If any!" she said, happily quoting the Munchkin bishop from the _Wizard of Oz_ movie. Dipper lugged the pet container out to Helen Wheels for her and with a wave, Mabel set off to take her new friend to the vet's.

* * *

 _At first when the human female came out to the pig sty_ _the dog had wanted to bolt and run_ _. He still didn't understand what had kept him from doing that. Maybe his sore leg, or maybe, just maybe, something else._

 _To this point in his young life, the dog had experienced very little contact with human beings, none of it pleasant. He had been screamed at and chased away from garbage cans, people had thrown sticks and rocks at him, an irate farmer had shot him with a pellet gun that had made his flank sting for days._

 _He came to regard people as threats to be avoided. He had never thought of them as companions. In fact, he had never had any companions._

 _He could only dimly remember his mother. He had been born in a hollow log in the forest, his mom an emaciated stray. Of the three pups, he was the only survivor (he did not really remember the other two and did not miss them). He was barely weaned and just able to find food for himself—though with great difficulty—by the morning when his mother did not wake up. Desolated, he had left her and the only home he had known. From then on, he slept where he could and ate what he could find or steal and keep for himself. Often enough other animals, and even Gnomes, took it from him._

 _He missed his mother. Her bones probably still lay in the log den._

 _The world as he came to know it was a place of peril, pain, and terror. However, he desperately wanted to belong. He was, after all, a dog._

 _The night before, the two pigs had accepted him and had shared their warm straw and their food with him. Perhaps that had set him up for the human female whose voice and touch were so soft. He did not understand the words she spoke to him, but he gathered from her tone that she meant him no harm._

 _And the human male and the other human female had been kind and had given him food that tasted amazing. The best he had ever eaten, though there was only a little of it. And they touched him carefully, reminding him of the days when his weak mother would lick him and comfort him._

 _Something he'd never felt before had been born within him. He had no words at all, not yet, and could not call it anything._

 _But a human might call it . . . trust._

 _And so in the little movable den that still faintly smelled like one of the pigs, the puppy lay and shivered with not only fear but also with dawning hope._

 _He knew nothing of cars except as hurtling indifferent monsters to be avoided when crossing a road. He had seen one kill a possum once and roar on into the darkness. He didn't even try to retrieve the possum, hungry as he always was, because the fear of cars lingered strong in him. Now he was inside one, full of unknown smells and strange noises and the alarming sense of movement._

 _But the girl sat beside him, making the car go, and she crooned soft words to him the whole way._

 _Fear was strong. But need was stronger. Hope was stronger._

 _Trust—strongest of all._


	3. Chapter 3

**Dog Days**

 **(July-August 2016)**

* * *

 **3: TLC**

Dr. Julius Setter had become a veterinarian in spite of his parents' insistence that he was born to be a doctor, part of a family tradition. His father had been a notable physician, Chief of Surgery at a Los Angeles hospital, internist to the stars, socially and financially a spectacular success. His older brother, Augustus, had followed in their father's path, to a certain extent, and was now one of the top plastic surgeons in southern California. Both Gus and the senior Dr. Setter gave every impression of being well-satisfied with their lot in life.

But Julius . . . was different. From early childhood on, he had always been an animal lover. When at the age of eight, he rescued an injured squirrel from the street beside the park, his father advised him: "I can inject it and kill it painlessly."

Julius had resisted. The squirrel could get better, he just knew it.

His dad had shrugged. "When it dies, I'll supervise and you can dissect it."

In fact, with Julius's help and constant attention, the squirrel had lived, had healed, and had gone back to its life in the park near their big house. Julius recognized it now and again for two or three years afterward, healthy and, as far as one can tell with a squirrel, happy.

However, through it all, his dad and mom never gave up on pushing Julius to become a doctor—financial security, they said. Prestige, they said. Reputation, they said. Opportunities to advance, they said.

But helping people—if they'd ever once mentioned that, Julius didn't recall the occasion. Maybe they sensed that Julius, a big but shy kid, sensitive and easily bullied, held an innate distrust of most people. But animals, now—he loved them. In high school he did not like English at all, a subject boring and useless, but in the tenth grade, one teacher did turn him on to a poem by Walt Whitman:

* * *

I think I could turn and live with animals,

they are so placid and self-contain'd,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

* * *

And just because the poem touched him and because he understood it and agreed with it, he did well in Mrs. Anstruther's English class. From there he went on to do well in college, because he was not stupid. Even his father admitted that: "Julie, you're not stupid, just too damned stubborn for your own good!"

The elder Dr. Setter, his dad, had more or less given up on him when he switched his major from pre-med to veterinary medicine. They remained at least cordial for years after that, but never were close. Julius didn't like people all that much, that was the problem. He didn't like flattering wealthy patients or indulging their whims or treating them for illnesses they imagined but did not actually have. On the other hand, his father took all that in stride and also took the income that went with it. Finally, Julius didn't much care for L.A., where even as a veterinarian he could have made a lot of money treating poodles and poms and Persians and other pampered pets of the movie stars.

Nah. Not for him.

He moved north, first to a small town north of Portland, where he was an assistant to an older vet for three years, and then east to Gravity Falls, where the farmers had no big-animal vet within fifty miles, and there he settled in, building a practice and gradually becoming aware of the strange nature of the valley. As his father had observed, Dr. Setter wasn't stupid, after all, but he was quite observant and curious about what seemed to be . . . unusual creatures. Fortunately for him, Dr. Setter did not spook easily, and because he made no very close friends to swap gossip with, what he saw of strangeness he kept to himself, and so the Society of the Blind Eye had never once "helped" him.

Quietly, without making a big deal of it, Dr. Setter had once splinted a fairy's bent wing. Another time he had removed a deeply embedded splinter from a Gnome's calf. The Gnome possibly thanked him. At least it said, "Shmebulock," and before it limped away, it gave him a mushroom, which he quietly accepted as payment. In a way, Dr. Setter was just a little bit too young. Had he come to the Falls roughly twenty-five years before he actually did arrive there, he might possibly have met Stanford Pines, with whom he would have had some things in common. That ship, though, not only sailed, but passed him in the night before his own ship had launched. The year that Ford vanished was the same year that young Julius had helped the squirrel.

Two years after Julius arrived in the Falls, down in L.A. his father had suddenly died, a shock to his younger son. His dad had known his days were numbered but had never bothered to tell either him or brother Gus. Julius barely even made it down to the funeral.

His mother already had a new romantic interest, a younger man, an internist at the hospital where his father had ruled the surgical roost and in which he had passed away. A month later, to Julius's mild surprise, he learned that under his father's will he had inherited something over a million dollars. That was peanuts compared to the amounts left to his brother Gus and to his mother, but Julius never once thought of complaining.

Dr. Setter used some of his inheritance to buy an old farm and fix up the house as his dwelling and office space and the barn as an animal hospital. Even after that, he had plenty of money left over, which he invested, quietly and wisely. And he settled in to do work he loved with the placid, self-contained animals. He charged reasonable rates, did a fine job, and made a comfortable living. Wealth never interested or tempted him. Within his narrow confines, he felt contented and happy enough.

Though he had never married, Julius had something of a mild social and romantic life. Not a spectacular version of either, but . . . comfortable. Rarely, he encountered people who made a favorable impression on him. He remembered them as exceptions to his general rule of not liking people very much.

Two of them were Dipper and Mabel Pines. Dipper had been instrumental in bringing an injured young Manotaur to him for treatment—and if his father had been Surgeon to the Stars, now Julius was Physician to the Manotaurs. He tended their illnesses (they were prone to tapeworm infections, among other things) and wounds (they were prone to, well, all kinds of these). In return, they gave him their deep respect and paid him in little bags of gold nuggets, which they tended to find in stream beds. They collected the gold because they liked its glitter, though they didn't hold it of especially high value—jerky, now, _that_ was treasure.

As for Mabel, not all that long before, she had brought him a pregnant mountain sheep—and the animal had given birth to a geep, of all things, a hybrid with a cantankerous goat as its father. Her handling of the animals had impressed Setter, and he liked her for it. He also tended to any ailment that Waddles or Widdles came down with—not very many—but he'd gotten to know her that way, too.

Now he gave the quivering, apprehensive dog its last injection and patted the animal's neck. "That's all, boy. You've been a good dog." Setter reached in the pocket of his lab coat and produced a snack, which the dog gratefully ate. Its shaking subsided.

"How is he?" Mabel asked.

"I think he'll do." Setter gently lifted the dog off the examining table and said, "Let's go sit. I'll be on my feet most of the day, and in ten minutes, I've got to work on a sick calf."

They went into the adjoining waiting room. Mabel sat, and the dog tried to leap up into her lap but didn't make it. She had to pick him up. "All right," Setter said, scribbling something on a pad and then ripping it off. "Here you go. This is the food I recommend. I gave your dog a flea and tick treatment, good for a month. Fill the prescription online and remember to give him the flea and tick preventative once every three months, beginning in the last week of October this year. The limp is muscular, not a bone issue. The poor guy must've run himself lame. If the dog's not over it in a week, bring him back. He's not chipped, and I'd say he's a stray, so—finders, keepers. He's at least six months old, no more than eight—all his adult teeth are in. He's seriously underweight. He's at eleven pounds and should be fifteen or sixteen. Feed him generously, but be careful when he starts to gain. He'll top out between twenty and thirty, and don't let him get fat. See that he gets lots of running in. No evidence of worms, which for a stray dog is a minor miracle, but the blood tests will show if he has any other parasites or problems. I will let you know. Any questions?"

"Um—what breed of dog is he?" asked Mabel.

Dr. Setter chuckled. "Given the mulligan stew that is the ancestry of most stray dogs, that's a hard one. However, for a change I've got a pretty good idea from his coloring, long neck, wedge-shaped head, and fishhook-shaped tail. He's a Carolina dog."

Mabel blinked. "A what now?"

"Carolina dog," the doctor repeated. "Also known as a yaller dog or American Dingo. That's not accurate, though—not much of a relationship between the Australian dog and this little guy. Near as anybody can figure, the Carolina Dog originated eons ago in India, offspring of the native wolves—smaller than their European cousins—and much, much later, as domesticated animals, they crossed the Bering Strait land bridge with the very first Native Americans. They are what is known as primitive dogs, meaning only they're a lot like their ancient ancestors. A few packs of them still run wild in South Carolina and Georgia. They have good senses of smell, but as hunters they rely on sight, not scent. They're intelligent and adaptable and can usually survive in the wild, though this one hasn't flourished. It's sort of rare to find one on the West Coast, but not unheard of. They make good pets, smart, independent, loyal, and gentle. Give me your email address, and I'll send you a brochure about them."

"I hear a car pulling up," Mabel said as she wrote out her addy.

Dr. Setter pushed up from his chair. "Yes, that'll be Mr. Athelny with his calf that doesn't like her mother's cooking. I've got to persuade her to drink her milk. You want me to bill you?"

"I've got the money with me," Mabel said. "What's the damage?"

The doctor stooped and entered some figures on the computer, and it printed out a statement. "With the immunizations—by the way, here's your rabies certificate and tag, be sure to get him a collar and attach the tag to it—it comes to, um. Ninety-five dollars even."

Mabel gave him five twenties, and he handed her a five and stamped the statement PAID. As they headed for the door, he asked, "What are you going to call him?"

"I haven't decided," Mabel said, urging the dog back into the carrier.

"Lucky," the doctor suggested with a broad smile. "He must be, to find an animal lover like you."

"Lucky." Mabel shook her head. "Somehow doesn't sound exactly right. I'll know it when it hits me. Thank you!"

"Thank _you_ ," Dr. Setter said, carrying the pet carrier and the dog out to her car. Nearby a farmer that Mabel didn't recognize was leading a black-and-white calf down a ramp from an animal trailer towed by a pickup. Setter put the pet carrier in the front seat of Helen Wheels and said, "Now, you be sure to call if that limp doesn't improve."

"I will! Thanks bunches!"

"You're welcome heaps," Setter said with a laugh. He closed the car door and turned, calling out, "Well, Sam, how long's this little lady been off her feed?"

* * *

Mabel made it back to the Shack at ten-thirty and found the place busy, but not as slammed as it had been back around Independence Day. She had time to talk to Dipper at the cash register. He asked, "How's the dog?"

"He's hungry but seems to be OK otherwise," Mabel said. "I'm working on trying to pick out a name for him."

"Any change?"

"I haven't even come with a name, let alone change it—ooh, sorry, you mean money change. The vet's bill was ninety-five, but then I had to buy some dog food, and I had to pay for some flea-control and heartworm preventative medicine, and he needed a collar for his rabies tag, and I got him some chew toys. You owe me fifteen dollars."

Dipper rolled his eyes. "I owe _you?_ See me on payday," he said. Like Lewis Carroll's twinkle-twinkling little bat, the sarcasm flew right over her head.

Wendy, in from the Museum with a small crowd of tourists, had overheard some of this, and she sauntered over and leaned on the counter. "So where is the little guy?"

"I put him up in Dipper's room," Mabel said. "I gave him a nice bowl of dog food and a bowl of water and his squeaky bone and left the crate up there with the door open. It's private, and I think he's worn out and needs to rest."

"I hope he doesn't pee all over everything," Dipper muttered.

"Don't worry, Brobro, I walked him on the lawn, and I'll do it again right after the lunch rush. Oh, the doctor says he thinks the limp comes from a minor sprain. We have to watch him and if it doesn't get better, we call the vet and take him in again. But there's no broken bones."

"That's good," Wendy said. She smiled wistfully. "You know, when I was a kid, I always wanted a dog of my own, but Dad said we weren't home enough to take care of one. So what are you going to name him?"

"Haven't decided," Mabel said.

"Dogwood," Wendy teased.

"Not gonna name him after a tree!" Mabel said firmly.

"Our cat," Dipper told Wendy, "is Jerk the Ripper."

"We just use Ripper, though," Mabel said.

Wendy grinned. "Let me guess—habit of shredding things?"

"Yep," Dipper said. "The sofa, the drapes, Mom's bras from the laundry basket, you name it."

"Well," Wendy said, pushing off from the counter, "a good name'll come to you. Hey, kid! Those are _not_ supposed to bounce!" She went to take a human skull away from a tourist boy. The skulls weren't real, but they weren't made of rubber, either.

* * *

 _The dog knew a word now:_ DOG. _The humans had used that word around him, and he got the idea that DOG meant ME and that he was a DOG. The girl human had given him some tasty, crunchy food and some clear water and had left him a warm bed in a peaceful room. After the shots and the excitement, he felt sleepy._

 _Curiously, he was not particularly anxious about being confined. The room had a comfortable, homey smell. The girl had been here many times, and she had put his carrier in the floor beside a bed where her scent lingered especially strong. The similar smell of the young male human (the girl's litter mate?) hung more strongly in the air, but with a doggy sort of sixth sense, the dog knew that the boy was, like the girl, essentially kind. For the moment, all was well: hunger sated and he had a chance to rest and heal._

 _Then, too, the fear that had long pursued him now itself stood at bay. The people of this house had treated him with kindness. He even liked the private, warm darkness of the carrier, and he crept into it, turned around three times, and lay down on the folded towels to consider things._

 _Odd that he had never pondered things before. Now it seemed natural to think about the world and his small place in it. Other words he had heard circled in his mind, without yet having a meaning attached to them—he knew the sounds, but not what the sounds signified: MABEL. DIPPER. WENDY. SHACK. A few others._

 _He remembered the older human male who had put him up on a metal table and had handled him gently but had prodded him, had taken his temperature (uncomfortably) who had stuck him with needles (not so bad), but who also seemed interested in him and concerned with his well-being. In a misty, vague way, the dog realized he had fooled the man once._

 _The man had felt his, well, private region. He had said something to the girl. The dog didn't know what it meant: "He's been neutered."_

 _Actually, no. The dog had instinctively drawn his, um, equipment, up into his body, out of some protective instinct. He had not been neutered. Not yet, anyway._

 _He yawned. He had been on the run too much lately, and weariness had seeped into his bones. He nuzzled the squeaky bone and lay his chin down on it. It was dark and quiet in the little cage on the soft towels._

 _A good place for a puppy to nap._

 _He fell asleep and, as the changes that had begun in his brain back on the grassy hill continued, he had some vivid and very strange dreams._


	4. Chapter 4

**Dog Days**

 **(July-August 2016)**

* * *

 **4: Leader of the Pack**

On Wednesday, Dipper and Wendy ran to town and back, keeping up their normal training routine. It was a hot morning, already eighty degrees at 7:45 as they slowed to walk up the driveway to the Shack. "Whoosh!" Wendy said, mopping her face with a bandana. "Gonna hit a hundred today, I bet."

"No takers," Dipper told her. "Feels like a hundred already. So—any plans for the weekend?"

She reached to hold his hand. "Meh, Dad and the boys are gonna be off bowling, as usual—Roseburg on Friday evening and then all the way to Eugene on Saturday, another tournament. So pretty much whatever you want to do. Movie night Friday, I guess, and then we'll think of some nice way to spend Saturday evening. Hey, two weeks from Friday, Woodstick hits!"

He got a quick flash of both anticipation and a little bit of worry from her. Wendy liked Woodstick, a music festival that let her cut loose and be a little raucous in public—but ever since she'd been hit by a jealousy spell tossed out by the Love God and not meant for her, some of the charm had worn off. Dipper asked, "Robbie and Tambry playing?"

"Yeah, three sets. The Tombstones are doin' two, and then Robbie and Tambry are gonna try some duets, not metal but softer pieces. They had two on their last album, remember, kind of ballad-y, and they're getting a lot of buzz, so they're gonna try out a few at the festival—whoops!"

She had opened the gift-shop door, and the puppy darted out. "Don't let him get away!" Mabel yelled from inside.

But the dog had no intention of getting away. Dipper dropped to one knee and the pup jumped on him, practically climbing him, licking his face. "Hey, good to see you, too!" he said, laughing.

Mabel came out, still in pajamas, with his leash. She clipped it to his collar. "Thanks for catching him. I was gonna take him for his morning walk, but I guess he heard you guys and headed for the door before I could get his lead on. Come on, dog!"

"You really ought to name him, Mabes," Wendy advised. "Make him feel part of the family."

"Yeah, but inspiration hasn't struck." She tugged, but the pup, wagging everything below his neck, wanted to socialize with Dipper and Wendy. "Come on, be a good dog!"

Dipper got up from where he'd knelt to hold the dog and asked, "Want me to walk him?"

"Would you mind? Here." Mabel handed him a plastic baggie.

Dipper made a face. "Yuck."

Mabel said, "Hey, it's a natural function! And look at me, I gotta wash his bed. Doc Setter gave him a flea-medicine injection, and you wouldn't believe how many fell off him last night!"

"Poor little dog," Wendy said. "Hey, I'll walk with you, Dip."

"Wait, wait, I have to give you instructions," Mabel said.

"I think I already know how to walk," Dipper told her.

Mabel stepped off the porch and onto the lawn , right behind Dipper. "No, you don't, not with a Carolina dog."

"He's from Carolina?" Wendy asked. She drawled, "Well, shut my mouth!"

Dipper did a bad Southern accent: "Bless his little old heart! He's come a long ways from home, I reckon!" The puppy seemed to enjoy the sound of their voices. He rolled on his back and wriggled in the grass.

"Har, har, you guys are killing me," Mabel groused. "No, he's not from North or South Carolina. That's just the name of the breed. He's a primitive dog!"

"I see," Dipper said. "That must be why he's tracking a bug right now. Insectivorous." And, sure enough, the dog was on his stomach, nose to the ground, hot on the trail of a scuttling speckled beetle.

"Listen!" Mabel said. "I'm being serious! The vet sent me a .pdf of a booklet about the breed. It's very ancient, and these dogs are different from other dogs. They're real loyal, but they're also independent."

"Yeah, but he didn't so good, being independent," Wendy said, kneeling and petting the dog, who writhed in pleasure.

Mabel nodded. "That's the trouble. If they get out on their own, they're apt to take off and not come back for maybe days. And they could get hurt or worse, and anything could happen! But, and this is key, a Carolina dog wants to have his place in the pack. If his humans establish dominance, then the dog won't run off like that. Here's how you have to do it—when you walk, you always have to be in the lead. Make him follow you, not drag you."

"I'll take a stab at it," Dipper said. He stood and gently but firmly pulled the dog into place, on his left and just behind his foot. "OK, dog, heel!"

They took a few steps, and Dipper kept the dog in position with difficulty. The pup wanted to go out in front. "Heel!" Dipper commanded several times while reining him in. They made one round of the yard, and—the dog got it. Just like that.

"Hey!" Wendy said. "He's doing it."

"You try it," Dipper said, handing the leash to Wendy.

At first the dog surged ahead, but Wendy said firmly, "Heel!"

Wonder of wonders, he did. "What a smart puppy!" Mabel gushed. "Come here and let me try it!"

Again the dog heeled perfectly. "He really is smart!" Dipper said. They walked the puppy until he did his business—Mabel told Dipper, "You got the bag, Brobro!" —and after the clean-up, he got the dog to sit after only three tries. Then to shake hands after two.

They might have experimented until tourists flooded in had Soos not looked out and warned them: "Hey, dawgs, and, um, dog! We open in twenty minutes. Better get a move on!"

They reluctantly went back inside, and Mabel fed the dog before showering and dressing. "You are such a great dog, yes, you are!" she said. Then she frowned. "I am not gonna talk baby talk to you, though. You just get yourself filled out a little and get over that limp, and you and I are going to have such a good time. And you can run with Dipper!"

Dipper and Wendy got their showers and all there of them ate a quick, simple breakfast of cereal, juice, and coffee. They barely had time to brush their teeth before taking their stations in the Shack.

As an experiment, they let the dog stay down in the gift shop, on a cushion between Mabel and Dipper and so between the cash registers.. In the guise of Mr. Mystery, Soos introduced him to tourists as "The Mystery Dawg! Where he came from is, like, a mystery! What his name is, is a mystery! But here he is, folks—get your picture taken in the Mystery Shack with the Mystery Dawg for only ten dollars!"

Later, Wendy said it wasn't fair that the dog made a hundred dollars in one day, when Soos was paying Dipper and Mabel only seventy-five a week.

That evening after dinner, and after Abuelita had tucked the kids in for the night, Mabel amazed the family by doing a dog-and-pony show, minus the pony. By then, the dog had learned to heel, sit, shake, high-five, speak, lie down, and roll over. Melody was a little worried by that. "He must have been trained to learn that fast," she said. "He must belong to someone."

"I don't think so," Dipper said. "He's just brilliant. He picks up on things quick. Just a very smart dog, that's all."

"Oh, dude!" Soos said. "That reminds me. You got a letter today, but we were busy when the mail came, and I forgot."

Wendy blinked. "Uh, Soos, how does saying he's a smart dog remind you of a letter?" she asked.

"Simple, dude," Soos said. "It's like, he's a smart dog. He makes me feel, you know, kinda dumb in a way because I Soos things up sometimes. Like one way I do that, is I forget things sometimes. Like the time I forgot my keys and drove into town without them and didn't have them in my pockets or anywhere, so I had to walk back to the Shack to find them. And, like, I couldn't! So I walked back to the car in town, and they were, like, in the ignition! Boom! So that reminded me I forgot the letter, see?"

"Um . . . yeah," Wendy said.

Soos went to the table where they usually put the mail when it came at a busy time. "Let me see, electric bill, flyer for Woodstick, insurance offer, here it is!" He passed a thick envelope to Dipper.

"From my agent," Dipper said. He opened the envelope and read the letter. And then read it again, just to make sure he hadn't misread it. "Oh, wow," he said.

The dog came to him and put its paw on his foot, whining anxiously.

Dipper reached down and scratched its ears. "It's OK," he said. "Huh. My heart's beating so fast. I wonder if he sensed that and thought I was scared—"

"Broseph!" Mabel said. "What _is_ it?"

"There's going to be a TV show," Dipper said. "Of my book. The first one. A cartoon series, it says. And I get half the TV movie and the publisher gets half. This is—it's thousands of—it's a whole lot of money!"

"Wow!" Mabel said. "Who's gonna play me?"

"Wait, wait—probably it'll take two years of production before it debuts. Details to come, it says."

"They have to get a better artist than they use for your covers!" Mabel insisted. "The illustrations on the covers don't even look like us!"

"Well, to be fair, they're not really us—they're Alexa and Tripper Palms," Dipper said.

"That's it!" Mabel yelled, jumping up and waving her arms in triumph. "We got it!"

"Got . . . uh, what?" Wendy asked.

"The _name_! It's perfect!" She scooped the puppy up in her arms. "From this day forth, you shall be known as Tripper!"

"Hey," Dipper said. "Don't you think that'll confuse him? When he hears my name, he'll think you're calling him!"

Mabel sat with the dog on her lap. She held his cheeks and stared into his eyes, and he seemed to stare back with great solemnity. "Listen, dog. You are Tripper! Tripper, get it?" She pointed. "He's Dipper. But you are Tripper! Tripper! You like that? Hah! He loves it! Look at how his tail's wagging! Tripper Pines, meet Wendy—that's Wendy—and you know Dipper—and me, I'm Mabel, and this is Soos, and Melody, and Abuelita—"

" _Hola, Treeper_ ," Abuelita said with her sleepy smile.

Mabel set the dog down. "Wendy, call him by his new name. See if he'll come to you."

Dipper said, "First, just say 'dog. Kind of a control for the experiment.'"

So they tried it. Wendy said "Here, dog." The puppy's tail thumped the floor, but he made no move.

"OK," Wendy said. Keeping her tone and inflexion the same, she said, "Here, Tripper."

And the dog went straight to her, limping only a little, and looked up in her face expectantly.

"Tripper?" Dipper said.

The puppy first looked his way, then came to him.

"This is like super exciting and a little scary, too," Soos said. "Oh, hey, that's great news, by the way, Dipper! A TV cartoon show! Can we let people know that you wrote the books now?"

"Not . . . just yet, please," Dipper said. "The letter says there are details to be worked out and contracts to sign, and even then it wouldn't come out before maybe 2018, and, uh—it, uh, you know, the deal may still fall through or something—"

"Dipper!" Mabel scolded. "Don't be so gloomy! Hey, you gotta go tell our grunkles! Ooh, and I'll take Tripper down to introduce them, too! Let's go!"

Later on, Dipper found it difficult to remember anything much of that evening. Oh, sure, the notion of a TV show, even an animated cartoon, based on his books was terrifically exciting, but it was scary, too. And while the prospect of enough money to, well, buy a _house_ was also exciting, it seemed somehow—somehow like—well, he'd once criticized Paz to Mabel: "Pacifica's rich, Mabel! She's cheating at life!"

It seemed unreal to him. Stan advised him to get an entertainment attorney right away. Stanford congratulated him but warned, "Don't let this sway you from your goals in life! You have so much to offer the world."

Still—scary. Yes, that was it. Wendy cheered him on, but even so—wow. What if everyone hated it? What if it flopped?

That night he tossed and turned until past midnight. And then the door opened. "Dipper?" Mabel, whispering.

"I'm awake," he said. "Can't sleep."

"Tripper wouldn't quiet down. I thought he wanted to go out, but he wanted to come up here instead. OK if he sleeps over with you?"

"I guess," Dipper said.

He heard the dog whimper a little, and then Mabel grunted. "Now stay down here on the foot of the bed!" she said.

"I didn't say he could sleep in my bed!" Dipper objected.

"Come on, Brobro! He's de-fleaed! And I think he knows you're all _whoa, I'm Dipper, I gotta look for the crappy lining to my silver cloud!"_

"It's not that—oh, just leave him. You got the leash?"

"I'll drape it over the foot of your bed." Mabel paused for a long time. "Um—OK if I sleep in my old bed tonight? I hate to be away from him."

"Help yourself," Dipper said.

He heard floofing sounds and realized that Mabel had come up with pillow and bedding under her arm. He herd her bedsprings creak. "Goodnight, Dipper."

"Goodnight, Mabel."

The puppy came up to his chest and curled up against him, warm and furry. He yawned once, wriggled, and then settled in.

Despite himself, Dipper smiled and put his hand on the puppy's neck. The dog grunted in a contented way. "Goodnight, Tripper," Dipper said.

And he felt more relaxed and realized he was sleepy and could get to sleep. He took a deep breath. In a vague kind of way, the thought drifted into his mind _: I think I've just been elected leader of the pack. . . ._


	5. Chapter 5

**Dog Days**

 **(July-August 2016)**

* * *

 **5: Dreams Know the Way**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** Thursday, July 28—Didn't get enough sleep last night. This news about the book really threw me. In a way, I'm afraid that whoever does the adaptation won't be careful and will mess up what I wrote and make people not like the idea of the books.

In a way, I'm excited. And there's the money. Though today I talked to Ford, who reminded me that there will be a big tax bite (publishers don't withhold money for the IRS) and that it probably would be better to work out a deal to be paid over several years. I suggested five years, because that will see me through college, if I'm lucky. He thinks I should have a CPA who'll take care of investing all the money up until then. That will give Wendy and me a great nest egg, he says. But he urged conservative investments and keeping half of it liquid.

I feel so—weighed down with responsibility! I mean, this doesn't put me in the Northwest neighborhood, or anywhere close to Grunkle Stan, even, but it may be more money than is good for me. Maybe I should give a bunch of it away to charity. I don't know.

Grunkle Ford once told me, "When you have a dream that you don't understand, just trust it to know the way—and follow it."

I'm not even sure that makes sense, but, whatever. I do have dreams. Last night brought a bunch, but I can't remember most of them. The last one, though—it was unusual.

And weird. A weird Gravity Falls dream. So what else is new? It's all kind of foggy now, but I've got a little time after my shower and before work, so let me sit here and try to recall a little of what went on.

First, it was a lucid dream—the kind where I know I'm dreaming. I was in the Mindscape, walking in the woods somewhere near the Shack. That much I know. It was the middle of the night, and there was a waning moon overhead, but no stars. I think I was searching for something or for someone.

I walked on and on and came to a deep gorge with a fallen tree over it. It looked rotten, and I was afraid to try to walk over it, but I knew I had to get to the other side. Somebody said, "I will test it."

And that was the first time that I became aware that someone had been following me, right behind me the whole way. Whoever it was—I don't remember a shape, just an impression of someone who sort of, I guess, glowed? Or was dressed in something white and swirly? Or, I don't know, was a kindly ghost? Anyway, someone walked across the log and said, "It will hold if you hurry."

So I edged out onto the log and teetered and nearly fell what looked like hundreds of feet down into a river where I knew monsters were thrashing and snapping the air with sharp teeth, but somehow I got across and hopped off the log, and the second I did, it crumbled and toppled down into the torrent.

I tried to find the person who'd helped me, but they were gone. So I went on alone through the woods, searching for something or somebody.

After a long, long time, I came out of the woods somewhere near the place where Wendy and I have gone camping, near Ghost Falls. Nothing looked familiar, though. The sky had become some kind of liquid, with flowing streams of glowing color winding through it, but the moon still shone down.

Ahead of me, I saw somebody sitting on a tall bank over the beaver pond—there aren't any tall banks there, really—fishing. The person seemed to be all bent over.

I didn't know until I got close that the fisherman was Bill Cipher. He patted the ground beside him but didn't speak. I sat down there and looked out. His pole stuck way out over the pond, but it didn't seem to have any fishing line.

"How are you?" I asked him.

"I'm sort of how, yes," he said in a considering sort of voice. "Not as how as I'd like to be, but hower than I have been lately. I hope you are the sane."

I wasn't sure I heard that last word right. "Sane?" I asked.

"Not for me, thanks, I'm driving," he said. "Shh. Don't scare them away."

"Who?"

He said very seriously, "I'm fixing for axolotls. They infester me. I don't know what I do them to want with me! Couldn't they be more less stupid? Sorry, Pine Tree, I'm my not-self right now. Only a little bitty bit left of me, most of it deep in your heart. A lone you're not at least. Who's a good boy?"

"You're not making sense," I told him.

"Am I making dollars? Each one is a hundred centses. No matter, mo' natter. Nothing is what, it seems," he said, oddly pausing in the phrase. "Pine Tree, be careful of the statute of intimidations."

"Statute?" I asked. "Statue, do you mean? Your effigy?"

"So are you, smart guy! It's not me. It's not my shadow. It's not even a mouse. But it's a fisher, too. A fisher in reality. But don't you get hooked, Pine Tree. Guard your keep up. Good you have a friend."

Then his fishing pole bent, as though he did have a line on it and had just felt a bite. He jumped to his feet, tugging hard, bending the bamboo pole into a U. He yelled something that sounded like "Weenie! Weenie! Weenie! You bes weenie ad mihi!" That's not it, but it sounded like that. I wrote the words as soon as I woke up.

The bamboo pole snapped with a sound like thunder, and Bill fell on his back in the grass. He jumped up, shaking his fist. "Oracle! Oh, wrecker! What do you have against me?" Then he adjusted his top hat, shrugged—sort of—and gave me a jaunty wave as he said, "See you around, Pine Tree. Remember, rambler, the statue is a fisher, too. That's not a smart crack. I'll catch you later, and your little dog, too!"

And he was gone. But then I became aware that Mabel's new dog Tripper was following me. In fact, I started to think he might have been the one who tested the log bridge first. I said, "I guess you can talk, too?"

He sat on the ground and did that sideways head-tilt that dogs do when they're interested or puzzled. But he didn't say anything.

"How come you showed up?" I asked him.

He got up, walked a little way off, and looked back at me, so I followed. We went through a belt of pine trees and came out on top of the grassy, domed hill that covers the crashed spaceship.

That's impossible in real life, the beaver pond is miles from the hill, but in dreams, I guess anthyding can hadplen, as Soos sometimes says.

"What's here?" I asked the dog.

And the mound suddenly split wide open—

And I woke up. I grabbed my Journal from the table next to the bed and scribbled down the words that Bill had said as fast as I could, because it seemed important.

As I lay back, the dog came up and nuzzled me under my chin. Then I looked at the clock. It was nearly seven, so I had to get out of bed and dress for the morning run. When I got up, the dog hopped out of my bed and went over to Mabel's, and I helped him up onto it. He curled up at the foot.

I finished getting into my running gear and shoes, and as I started out to meet Wendy, I heard Mabel say, "Be careful."

"I will," I called back.

And Mabel stirred and muttered, "Humh? Dipper? What'd you say?"

"Nothing," I told her.

And now that I've had time to sit down and try to write everything as I remember it, well, only now have I started to wonder—was Mabel even the one asked me that question?


	6. Chapter 6

**Dog Days**

 **(Friday, July 29, 2016)**

* * *

 **6: Not Quite Right**

Friday was a little more hectic than the rest of the week had been, at least as far as tourists went, but nothing to compare to the July 4th rush. If everything went as usual, Soos expected another surge of business leading up to and just after Labor Day. But it was nice to have sufficient business to keep everyone on their toes but not so much they were out of their minds.

Tripper seemed to be mending nicely. His limp was almost gone, and he had visibly gained a little weight. He was definitely an odd dog. For one thing, he listened.

Mabel had sat in the floor holding his front paws and gazing into his face. The dog met her gaze—though Dipper had read it was best NOT to make direct eye contact with a dog because they took it as a threat.

And Mabel had said, "You have to eat all your breakfast and all your dinner so you'll grow up to be a good strong doggy. See? Here's your bowl. I'm gonna measure out the right amount of dog food for you—here you go. Now eat every last bite of that for me, OK?"

And Tripper had done it—not like a dog normally did, with quick snaps and hasty swallows, but with an unusual sort of doggy dignity, deliberately and not too slow, not too fast. After the bowl was empty, he nosed around and found three pellets that had fallen from the bowl or his mouth and had eaten them too. Then he trotted to the door and looked expectantly over his shoulder.

He now always came when you called his name, whether he was on the leash or not. Mabel told him "Run!" and he did laps around the house, obviously enjoying the exercise. But she held him to ten minutes, not wanting to re-injure his leg. He would have run with Dipper and Wendy if Mabel had let him, but she vetoed the idea. "When we're a little more certain he's not gonna strike off on his own," she said.

Teek, who liked dogs, was a little put off by Tripper at first because he was a small animal. Teek's definition of "dog" hovered in the Lab/Retriever range. However, once Mabel introduced him as "Teek's gonna be one of your friends," Tripper accepted him and was perfectly happy to chase a Frisbee with Teek. And Teek began to admit that the little dog had some good points, dog-wise.

Wendy stayed over for dinner on Friday, since her dad and brothers were going to be away, and afterward, Ford came up and they took Tripper down to his lab, where—of course—a suspicious Ford put him through his battery of tests. Most showed nothing but normal dog, though one—Ford rubbed his chin thoughtfully and stared at the display screen of one scanner. "This is a little unusual," he muttered. "His supernion readings are abnormally high."

"He's a super dog?" Wendy asked.

Ford shook his head. "No, no, 'supernion' is my name for a hypothetical subatomic particle that carries a weirdness charge. Those of us who live in the Valley have elevated readings of it, too—not as high as, say, a fairy or a Gnome, but about ten per cent higher than the human mean. Mine's about twelve per cent, and Mason's is only about eight. Wendy, you're at ten point five—"

"You've been testing us?" Dipper asked.

"I've scanned you both many times," Ford said with a smile. "Relax. It doesn't seem to have any negative effects, unless it's to make you slightly more aware of paranormal events and creatures. Although Stanley's reading is a bit higher even than mine—I believe that's partly heredity, though. And I have wondered if his abnormal luck at gambling might be the supernions somehow channeled to produce a desired result."

"What does he say?" Wendy asked.

Ford put on a sour expression and did an expert imitation of Stanford's voice: "Particle, shmarticle, Poindexter! Luck ain't nothin' but smarts and patience!"

In spite of himself, Dipper had to laugh. "That is so Stanley!" he said.

Tripper, now down from the table, went sniffing around the lab. He bristled at a container and growled a little. "Hm," Ford said. "I once confined a cycloptopus in that, years ago. Perhaps the dog is sensitive to paranormal residue. Surely not even the scent would linger this long."

Tripper evidently figured out that no arcane beast currently occupied the cage, because he circled it, then lost interest. "I had a dream with him in it," Dipper said. He glanced at Wendy. "And Bill Cipher, too. In his old shape, but . . . weak, I guess? It was strange."

"Tell me about it." Ford sat back with his big hands on his knees and listened intently. "How sure are you of the messages?" he asked. "I mean, those puzzling . . . pronouncements of Bill's?"

"Well, I wrote down a couple as soon as I woke up. I think the others are pretty much as I told you, but I can't be sure. It didn't make any real sense. It was like things were scrambled up."

"Hmm." Ford's gaze moved to the puppy, who was happily curled up at Dipper's feet. "I don't know. Cipher has a convoluted mind and a strange sense of . . . is humor the right word? I suppose so. When he and I were, uh, in regular communication, he frequently gave me written guides to various projects which I later discovered contained clever little codes. What did he say about the effigy?"

Dipper frowned, trying to remember exactly. "Well, it was a real strange dream. Bill had a bamboo fishing pole and was sitting, I think, on the bank of the beaver pond near Ghost Falls, fishing, but with no hook or line. He said he was fishing for axolotls. The Axolotl, I guess?"

"Possibly," Ford said. "The Axolotl is a . . . force, I suppose, that is in charge of maintaining order and discouraging chaos. Very powerful, extremely enigmatic, and all but impossible to get in touch with. But you said something about the effigy?"

"Bill said it was fishing, too. He told me to keep up my guard."

"Troubling," Ford said. "I think we've isolated it enough so it can't corrupt anyone or anything—but it has no sentience, no consciousness. Nothing of the real Cipher remains in it."

"You sure about that, Dr. P.?" asked Wendy.

"As certain as I can be. It's fishing, he said . . . let me think about that. I've checked on the effigy at least every few days, you know. The gold beetles are rebuilding the broken-off arm, but very slowly. And it's becoming, ah, frosted, coated, I mean, with a very thin layer of gold dust. I'm tempted to give it a blast with a quantum destabilizer."

"Why don't you?" Dipper asked.

"Because I'm not sure whether that would destroy it—or make it more dangerous. There are many things we don't understand about Cipher and his realm, Dipper. Studying them is high on my list of priorities once my Institute opens in the fall. However, my monitors show no conscious activity around the effigy, so—I'd say your dream was prophetic and prudent to the extent of advising you to keep your guard up. Otherwise, watchful waiting seems our best bet."

"And the other part of the dream," Dipper said. "The part about the mound over the UFO just . . . cracking like an egg. What does that mean?"

"Maybe that something is coming," Ford said. "I don't believe the UFO, as you call it—I prefer the spacecraft—is going to power up after all these eons and burst out of the hill. It isn't capable of that. Too many of its systems are shattered. But it's possible that something weird is about to, well, hatch. That would be within the norm for Gravity Falls."

* * *

Teek and Mabel planned to take Tripper over to the dog park (after strenuous work by Mayor Cutebiker and the town council in revoking a number of complex and outdated laws, dogs were finally allowed in the Earl Somerset Dog Park) for exercise. Dipper and Wendy went over to the Corduroy house for their movie night.

They found one they hadn't seen, a Good Enough production entitled "Plan Nine from the Planet People of Planet Planet." Like most of the Good Enough productions, it dated from the fifties and had been made on an apparent budget of whatever loose change the cast and crew had in their pockets that day. Chadley and Trixandra weren't in it—it had been made a couple of years before their heyday—but they recognized the actor who played Chadley as young "Butch the Paperboy," though at some points in the movie his name seemed to be Buster or Bubba.

The film "starred" an old-time horror actor—he had specialized in suave vampires back in the early 1930s—named Nosfer Atu. Dipper said, "Wait a minute!" as the opening credits rolled. He dug out his phone and checked an Internet movie site.

He entered a query and then said, "Huh! Atu passed away in November of 1953. This film was released—"

"Dude, it _escaped_."

"—it hit the theaters in June 1955. How in the heck did it get made with a dead star?"

"Maybe they propped him up," Wendy suggested, reaching for the popcorn.

But as they watched, it became clear. Nosfer Atu was featured in a couple of early scenes, as a scientist trying to contact beings from other planets. He had not a word of dialogue—just a voice-over from a bored-sounding announcer explaining that the formerly revered scientist had been ostracized by his colleagues for daring to suggest he could contact aliens by radio signal. The visuals had him leaning forward over a plain, scarred and beat-up wood table on which perched a conglomeration of flickering light bulbs and a speaker as he appeared to listen to something not actually on the soundtrack. He fiddled with knobs that did nothing.

And that was all. Dipper said, "What a rip-off! They had some footage of him being a mad scientist or something and just spliced it into the film so they could claim it had a big star!"

"I wouldn't exactly call him a _big_ star," Wendy said.

A few minutes later, the film showed Atu, except it was an obvious double, hunched over the space radio, shot from behind. An unconvincing poof of smoke and a mismatched "boom" effect was, according to the narrator, "A mysterious explosion caused by deadly N-rays sent through the radio from space that left Professor Dabbler so terribly disfigured he never again dared show his face!"

Sure enough, the next scene showing the Professor had some guy dressed in clothes similar to his, but with his whole head completely mummy-bandaged so he never once had a line of dialogue. "Boo!" Wendy said. "Those N-rays caused him to grow a foot taller than he was!"

"And I think he gained fifty pounds, too," Dipper agreed.

It wasn't clear, but it seemed the space invaders now somehow controlled the injured professor. About twenty minutes in, the aliens, played by middle-aged men and women in footie pajamas, landed in the local cemetery, which must have featured cheap funerals since all the headstones were obviously made of cardboard, and began to resurrect zombies from the graves. Again, their purpose was never specified, but it all might have been a part of their plan to take over the world.

"I think we've seen this plot before," Dipper said.

"You think?" Wendy asked, rubbing his chest. "Hey, want to play a game?"

"What?" Dipper asked.

She toyed with a shirt button. "Um, every time somebody gets killed by a zombie, we each get to take an article of clothing off the other!"

"Very tempting!" Dipper said. "But that'd be too irresistible, and we'd be out of material too soon. How about we kiss instead?"

"I'll settle for that," she said. They adjourned from the sofa and lay back on the bearskin rug instead, cuddling, snacking on popcorn, laughing at the stupid movie, and exchanging frequent, salty kisses. When even that got dull, Dipper brought out a roll of peppermint Life-Savers. Then things became a little more interesting and the kisses more extended.

When Butch, the paperboy, accidentally discovered that the aliens were susceptible to poisoning if you squirted salt water on them from water pistols (the movie didn't explain why he had salt water in his plastic squirt gun), the movie hit the big climax. As cops armed with plastic water pistols attacked, the space invaders dropped their N-ray blasters, screamed, and fell to the floor, dissolving into mush, except you only saw them falling and then floppy, empty pajamas with a splatter of mush (it looked like lumpy oatmeal and probably was) where their heads should be.

By that time, Wendy and Dipper had almost lost interest in the movie. Even the shocking conclusion, in which Professor Dabbler sacrificed himself to blow up the spaceship and, when the bandages came off his dead body, was revealed to have only a skull for a head, they hardly paid attention.

Except Dipper did glance at the screen and point out, "Hey, his skull's made of plastic, his cranium's detachable, and somebody screwed a hook in the top of his head!"

That was a mistake because Wendy took advantage of his distraction to give him a slurpy kiss on his neck and wound up awarding him a spectacular hickey.

Oh, well. In this world you have to pay for your fun.

But after another long, proper, passionate kiss, Wendy gasped and broke away. "Dipper! I was catching your thoughts—"

"Sorry," he said, red-faced. "I'm getting all worked up, with your strip game in mind, you know, just thinking of doing this with, uh, all our clothes off—"

"No, not that! Sweet, but not that! You told Dr. P. wrong! I got a flash of your memory. Bill didn't say the statue of him was fishing! He didn't even say it was a fisher. The word is fissure!"

"Fiss—" Dipper said. He felt as if he had been hit by an electric shock, or maybe an N-ray. "Oh, gosh! I gotta call Ford!"

Wendy said, "Because—"

"Yeah," Dipper said, scrabbling for his phone. "A fissure is the same as a rift!"


	7. Chapter 7

**Dog Days**

 **(Friday, July 29, 2016)**

* * *

 **7: Fissure**

The sun was not long down, but darkness came slowly on as Ford, Wendy, and Dipper hiked out to the clearing in the woods. The heat remained, lessened, like the heat in a boiling pot when the lid is lifted. The early night felt oppressively humid, too warm for comfort. A few bats whirled and twittered above them. An owl out hunting gave a prolonged _hoooo._ Under the drooping trees the darkness lay thick, and they switched on their flashlights.

"There it is," Wendy said, coming to a halt.

Ahead of them, in its small clearing, the steel dome that Fiddleford had erected around the statue blocked most of it from their vision, but when Dipper shone his flashlight directly on it, a golden glitter showed where the effigy stood.

"Stay back," Ford cautioned. He switched on his anomaly detector and slowly circled the steel structure and the statue it protected. Dipper could see the display screen, pale blue, flicker as graphs and figures formed on it. When Ford finished the circuit, he grunted.

"Bad?" Wendy guessed.

Ford put the detector away and took out his own flashlight. "Well . . . not good. There's definitely a degree of dimensional leakage going on here. Not enough for anything to come through physically, but perhaps leading up to a gateway event."

"So . . . " Dipper said, "you mean maybe something from the other side is trying to change the statue enough so it'll open up a portal to—the Nightmare Realm?"

"Well, I assume so, since that's where the rift opened last time," Ford said. "And when Stanley defeated Bill, his minions—most of them, anyway—were sucked back into the Nightmare Realm and the rift closed. Bill's not there any longer, but his followers surely are, and they hate us. Or perhaps they only hate the place to which they've been condemned."

"What is it exactly?" Wendy asked.

"I can't really tell you, for the simple reason that I'm not a hundred per cent sure," Ford said. "This much we do know: The Nightmare Realm isn't really a dimension. You've had experience of some of those—"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "The heavy dimension where there's no Hammerspace, and everybody's got five fingers. I mean, all their lives! And where there was a TV cartoon show that kind of imitated our real lives—what's wrong, Dipper?"

Dipper had suddenly jerked, as though in quickened fear. "Um, I'll tell you later," he said. "But, yeah, Grunkle Ford, Wendy knows what different dimensions are."

"Well, the Nightmare Realm isn't a fully-formed dimension at all," Ford said. "It's a madhouse of a plane of existence, where all rules of logic and reason break down—completely chaotic."

"Like Dante's Inferno," Wendy suggested. She had read a translation of that poem in one of her community-college English classes.

Ford said, "Something very close to that, yes. A place of madness and random terrors. It's evidently all that is left of Bill Cipher's original dimension. Some unimaginable tragedy occurred there, which led to its collapse and reduction. Just before I returned home from there—involuntarily, pulled by the Portal my brother opened in the same way that Bill's henchmaniacs were pulled back through the rift—just before that happened, I was fighting Bill and stood a good chance of destroying him."

Dipper had never really understood why Ford had seemed so enraged by Stan's having, after all, brought him home. He began to get a glimmer, though.

Wendy asked, "So, like, the monsters and freaks went back through to there, that place or whatever? They're in the Nightmare Realm right now?"

"As far as anyone knows," Ford said. "Xanthar remained behind, as we know, until we banished him to his own dimension. And I'm persuaded the eyebats came from there, though that was perhaps hundreds of years ago, through just a partial rift. I do know they're incredibly common in the Nightmare Realm."

Wendy continued, "And . . . so Bill's monsters . . . they might be trying to . . . get back here?"

"It's a possibility," Ford said. "This dimension offered them raw material—another place to corrupt into chaos."

Dipper spun around, shining his flashlight into the woods behind them. "Shh! Hear that?"

Ford and Wendy both held their breath. Whispering, Ford began, "I can't hear—"

And then Tripper came bounding through the underbrush, trailing his leash.

"Mabel and Teek must've got back from the dog park," Dipper said, kneeling. "And I guess lost their hold on him. Here, Tripper!"

The dog came straight to him and leaned against him, shivering and faintly growling.

"He senses something," Ford said.

Dipper handed Wendy the flashlight as he stood. He gripped the leash firmly. "Here, let's try something. Come with me, boy."

Tripper let Dipper get to within about ten feet of the metal cage, and then he jerked and pulled frantically. Dipper backed off, and the dog calmed down, though he still panted as if he'd run for miles. "It definitely spooks him," Dipper said.

They heard Mabel and Teek, both yelling "Tripper!"

"I'll go explain," Dipper said, leading the dog away from the statue—to Tripper's evident relief.

"There you are!" Mabel yelled a couple of minutes later, as Dipper emerged on the trail. She scooped Tripper up and put her nose against his. "You were a bad doggy! Hey, Dip! This little rascal jerked away just as I was getting him out of the car—wait, what are _you_ doing here?"

"The Cipher statue's acting up," Dipper said. He quickly told the two as much as he knew. That didn't take long.

Ford and Wendy emerged from the forest as he finished. "So what are we gonna do?" Mabel asked, setting Tripper down and reaching for the leash.

"It's nothing a grappling hook can solve," Ford said kindly. "The catch is that we can't yet do _anything_ —no one quite understands the dynamics of the situation. I feel confident that we could destroy the effigy—but that might be just what the beings, or the force, that's trying to repair the statue want us to do. It may be the effigy is the only thing plugging the potential rift between our realm and Bill's old stomping grounds. Until I'm sure, I don't dare take the risk of eliminating it."

The pup was tugging Mabel toward the Shack. "I don't think he likes it here," she said.

"Let's all go back," Ford said. "I don't really want to involve the Agency, not at this point, but I can at least use some of our resources to do a little investigation. Come on, it's getting late."

Not all that late—past nine, and lingering deep twilight by the time they reached home—so as soon as they were back inside the Shack, Dipper took out his phone and dialed a number.

* * *

"Hello?" It was Billy Sheaffer's voice, sounding not at all sleepy.

"Hi," Dipper said. "Too late?"

He said, "Hi, Dipper! Huh? Oh, no, I was just playing Empirization on the computer. Have you ever played that?"

"No," Dipper said.

"It's kinda cool. You start out with a village with just three huts, and you try to build that into an empire over thirty centuries. You gotta form alliances with other villages and find places to colonize and stuff, and sometimes other, stronger places will attack you—"

"Sounds exciting," Dipper said. "You can tell me all about it later, OK? So, I haven't called in a while—we've been real busy. But I was wondering how things are going with you."

"Oh, you know, it's OK," Billy said. "I'm going to High Adventure day camp, where we do crafts and learn swimming and canoeing and stuff. I'm not any good at baseball, though, so I sit that out. It's a depth perception thing."

"Yeah, must be hard," Dipper said. Having only one eye did mean he'd be disadvantaged in that department. "So—having any bad dreams? You had some when you visited up here."

"Mm, I don't remember," Billy said. "I think maybe I do, just once in a while. But they go away when I wake up, you know. I haven't, uh, you know, had any accidents or anything. Don't tell Mabel that, though."

Dipper knew, but Mabel didn't, that Billy had wet the bed one night, to his great embarrassment, while gripped in a nightmare. "I won't say a word," Dipper promised. "But that kind of thing happens. I did it once when I was your age and had the flu. It's not as big a deal as it seems at first. So you haven't been dreaming of statues and stuff?"

"No." Long pause. "I think I dreamed once that Mabel got mad with me, I don't know why. But she was mad and she called me a funny name. I mean funny-strange. She called me 'Nacho.' That's pretty dumb."

"Sounds like a bad dream, all right," Dipper said.

"Dipper?"

"Yeah?"

The silence went on for so long that Dipper started to think he'd lost Billy. But then the boy asked, "Could I come up again? I don't mean now, or even this summer. My folks are going on a long trip with us next month, so there wouldn't, you know, be time. But maybe I could visit again sometime?"

"I think that would be great," Dipper said.

Then Billy perked up: "Oh, I got your book about the lake monster! It's real funny. Will you sign it for me when you get back home?"

"Sure," Dipper said. "Count on it."

"Um, how are Mabel's pigs?"

"They're fine," Dipper said. "Fat as ever. When we come home, she'll bring a new pet. A dog."

"I think," Billy said slowly, "I think . . . I'm afraid of dogs?" His inflection made it a question, one that Dipper had no way of answering.

* * *

 _Later that night Tripper again slept on the foot of Dipper's bed. For a long time he lay there, quiet but alert, disturbed and . . . thinking._

 _I am Tripper. The leader is Dipper. My best friend is Mabel. The boy's friend is Wendy. This place is the Shack. I have words now._

 _The words flitted through the dog's mind: good boy. Bad dog! Eat. Food. Come. Sit. Shake. High five! Lie down. Roll over. Jump!_

 _He had no word yet for "danger."_

 _And yet he sensed danger—sensed it very strongly in the woods near the structure that smelled cold of strong steel. Something not-inside it but inside it. Something that was not-there but there, or almost there._

 _It was like a boy pressing his ear against a hollow tree somewhere in the forest, hearing, feeling the furious buzzing of a beehive inside. Killer bees. Bees that would erupt in a cloud of pain at the least disturbance. So close. Held off by so little._

 _Something pressed from . . . somewhere. Something wanted in. And the boy and girl must be kept safe. The Pack must be kept safe._

 _It puzzled him. He had been in desperate fights before, but this was nothing he could bite, nothing he could warn off with an angry bark or with the baring of his teeth and the raging snarl._

 _It was nothing and yet something. It was nothing wanting to become something. It was nothing-something that hated this world and everything in it._

 _He did not have the words._

 _Silently, the dog tried to form words with his mouth and tongue, the way the people did: Dipper. Mabel._

 _But his vocal equipment was not meant to make words. He could come out only with very soft whines that only approximated words: ehuhhh. A-uhhl._

 _If only he could talk. Or do the thing that Wendy and Dipper did._

 _Speak mind to mind. He could edge into Dipper's dreams at night, come right up to the periphery and stare, like a dog reaching the limits of its yard and gazing longingly into the neighbor's forbidden territory. He thought that Dipper was aware of him on such occasions._

 _But he and Wendy—even from the outside, Tripper could catch flashes of their mental communications, especially the feelings of love. Most of all that._

 _If only . . ._

 _Outside the Shack, something howled not very far off, maybe a dog or a coyote. Not a wolf, not the right timbre or pitch for a wolf._

 _Tripper's head came up, ears perked._

 _The howl repeated, and the dog understood its underlying message. Put into human terms, the animal was saying forlornly, "I'm so lonely."_

 _Tripper relaxed again, snuggled against Dipper's lower legs._

 _I am lonely, too._

 _I always was but did not know it._

 _Then I found Mabel, and she made me not-lonely._

 _But then I came, somehow, to think. To know myself and the world around me._

 _And here I am in the cage of my awareness._

 _So close to them._

 _Yet . . . so lonely._


	8. Chapter 8

**Dog Days**

 **(Saturday, July 30, 2016)**

* * *

 **8: A Vision Softly Creeping**

Saturday dawned bright and so hot that Dipper and Wendy curtailed their morning run to only thirty minutes down the Mystery Trail for a mile and a half and then back to the Shack. They came in gasping. "Whoosh!" Wendy said as they mounted the steps to the porch, "How hot's it gonna be today?"

"Hot," Dipper said. Inside, they tuned the TV to the weather net, keeping the sound very low. "Oh, man," Dipper groaned as he flopped onto the sofa next to Wendy, "look at that!"

The local forecast for Central Oregon predicted highs of 102-105 degrees coupled with unusually high humidity for the lower elevations, in the nineties for the west side of the mountains. "We a lower elevation?" Wendy asked, her head thrown back so she was staring up at the ceiling, her long neck glistening with sweat.

"About as low as you can get, here in the valley," he muttered. They heard the attic door open, and a moment later Tripper came bounding down the stairs, all energy and excitement. Behind him came Mabel, who had not slept in Dipper's room the previous night but who had evidently gone up to check on the dog.

"Hi," Mabel said with a yawn. "Hey, Dip, little favor, before you go out in the mornings, walk the dog, OK? He woke me up scratching on the door."

"I _did_ walk him," Dipper said. "First thing when I got dressed to run. Not even an hour ago."

"How'd he do?" Mabel asked.

Fanning himself with his trucker's cap, Dipper glanced at his sister. "What do you expect? He did what he was supposed to," he said. "See, he doesn't even want to go out now. Look at him. He just wants to be with us."

"I've been thinking of making him a sweater," Mabel said, leaning down to scratch the dog's chin.

"Oh, girl, wait until it's cooler!" Wendy told her. "Weather like this, you'll give him a heat stroke."

Mabel agreed: "Yeah, I figured, so I'm gonna make him a little tee shirt instead. And on the back it will say, 'I pooped, I peed, I got the tee shirt!' What do you think?"

"I think Soos will order a thousand of them and give you a quarter for every one he sells," Dipper said.

Mabel bounded in her chair. "Ooh, that would be so cool! So I'll add a little line that says 'Mabel Pines Creations' down at the hem! Of course to be cost effective, I'll have to have the ones we sell printed, not embroidered. Great business idea, though! Thanks, Broseph! Hey, hey, I haven't made it yet, you little wiggle worm!"

A squirming Tripper had jumped in her lap and was enthusiastically licking her face and chin and neck, and she couldn't hold onto him to calm him down. "OK, OK, I'm gonna get some jeans and shoes on, and we'll go visit my pigs and you can run round and round and round! Is that good?"

Surprisingly, Tripper yipped—and it sound like enthusiastic agreement. Mabel went down the hall to her room to change. Tripper jumped onto the sofa and wedged himself in between Wendy and Dipper. "Dude," Wendy murmured, "that would be so sweet if your body temp wasn't over a hundred degrees! Here, I'll give you some room." She scooched over a few inches.

Dipper idly tickled the dog's ears, which he seemed to enjoy. "You like that, boy?"

Again Tripper yipped, very quietly. "Huh," Wendy said. "Sounds like he's trying to answer you."

"Hang on a minute. Down!" Dipper said. The dog obediently jumped off the sofa and sat looking up at him expectantly. Dipper thought for a second. Then he leaned forward and touched one of the dog's paws. "This is your left paw," he said. He touched the other. "This is your right paw. Left. Right. Right. Left. Do you know which is which?"

A yip.

"Show me, boy. Pick up your right paw." Tripper only did a doggy "Huh?" head-tilt, nothing more.

Wendy, still leaning way back, murmured, "Dip, maybe he doesn't get 'pick up.'"

Dipper leaned down again and gently raised the left paw. "Pick up your left paw. Left." He repeated with the right one and then did each twice more. Then he straightened again and said, "Pick up your right paw."

Tripper raised his right foot and let it dangle. Dipper leaned forward again and nudged. "Down. Good boy. Now pick up your left paw."

Tripper raised his left paw.

"Down."

Dipper did a series of four, randomizing them. Tripper never made a mistake.

"This is an amazing dog," Wendy said.

Dipper said, "Tripper, if you can understand what I'm saying, pick up your right paw."

Up it came.

Dipper and Wendy stared at each other. "He is amazing," Dipper said.

But before they could test Tripper's understanding further, Mabel came in. "OK, Trip," she said. "We're gonna go visit the pigs. If I don't put on your leash, will you behave yourself and not run away?"

The right paw came up again.

"He says yes, Mabes," Wendy told her.

Mabel giggled. "Yeah, right, what are you, the dog whisperer? Come on then, but you be a good boy or I'll bring you right back in."

"This . . . is kinda creepy," Dipper said as soon as they were gone.

"Yeah, but he's real cute," Wendy said.

"That's no reason to put up with creepiness," Dipper told her.

She grinned at him. "Hey, I put up with you! Thin ice, Dip!"

He chuckled. "I didn't mean we ought to get rid of him, but a dog like that—how much should we tell Ford?"

"Nothing right now," Wendy said firmly. "Tripper's too cute and too young to have to be locked up in a lab and studied and poked and prodded. And just think, you may be exploring new breakthroughs in canine-human communication!"

"I wonder," Dipper said. "Ever hear of the Clever Hans effect?"

"Nope," Wendy said, flopping her head back again and sighing. "But I'll bet you I'm gonna."

Resisting the urge to go into a full Ford lecture, Dipper said, "OK, there was this horse in, I think, Germany back around 1890 to 1900. Horse's name was Hans."

"Shoulda been 'Hooves,'" Wendy said.

"You sound like Stan. Anyway, Hans's owner thought he was an extra-smart horse and experimented with him. I mean, he asked him questions, and the horse answered correctly."

Wendy nodded thoughtfully. "I think I understand. Like, the guy would ask the horse 'Are you a human?' and the horse would say, 'Nay!'"

Dipper rolled his eyes. "Don't channel Mabel, either. No, it's like he'd ask the horse a math problem—how much is three plus six, for example. And the horse would stamp his foot nine times. He never got an answer wrong. And he could even tap out words. They put a blackboard up with all the letters numbered, like A was one, B was two, and so on up to Z, which was twenty-six taps. If they asked Hans 'Who wrote this piece of music' and then let him hear the beginning of the Fifth Symphony, he'd tap out 'B-E-E-T-H-O-V-E-N."

"Must've taken a long time to tap out a word."

Dipper admitted, "Yeah, it did, but still, he never made a mistake. Sort of like a slow telegraph operator, I guess."

"So since I never heard of this horse, I'm guessing it was all a fraud?" asked Wendy.

"Not exactly," Dipper said. "It turned out that the horse's owner, a guy named, what was it, Oscar something, was giving the horse little signals, but he didn't know he was doing it. Like when the horse was counting, when he got to the right answer, his owner would give just a tiny little nod, not even meaning to, and the horse would see it and stop."

"Like a poker tell!" Wendy said. "Dude, I get it!"

"Right, and so the horse—wait, what? How do you know about poker tells?"

"I've been to a casino before," Wendy said, a little smugly.

Dipper blinked. "What? You're not old enough!"

"But I _look_ old enough," Wendy said complacently. "And when I went with Stan, nobody checked my ID."

"When did you go with—" Dipper put his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, the way Ford did when concentrating. "Tell me later. I was saying, supposedly the horse could also read math problems written on a chalk board. As long as Oscar could see them, the horse got the problems right. But when the horse could see them but the owner couldn't, he messed up every time. It took a lot of study before scientists discovered what was really going on."

"OK," Wendy said, standing up. "So you think Tripper may be picking up on, like, unconscious cues?"

"Might be," Dipper said. "When we don't have a work day ahead, let's test him."

"But still, don't tell Ford."

"Not yet," Dipper agreed.

"Good, that's settled. Let's shower and change clothes. I want just a light breakfast, gonna be so hot today, so think of something."

Mabel and the dog had come back in by the time Wendy and Dipper were ready to eat. They settled on cornflakes with chopped strawberries, plus whole-grain toast with a smear of peanut butter. All the time they ate, Tripper sat beside the table licking his chops and looking forlorn. Dipper glanced at him. "You mooching for a treat?" he asked.

The dog tilted his head.

Wendy said, "'Mooching' means 'wanting,' dude."

Up came the right paw. Dipper finished his breakfast and gave Tripper a doggy chew as a treat.

* * *

Tripper ran a lot during the morning, whenever Mabel could go out and watch him, though when the thermometer topped a hundred he declined to go outside. Then he snoozed on the cool floor in the gift shop. He was excellent with children, patient and very gentle. Little Soos and Harmony loved him, and he tolerated their hugs and giggles and Little Soos's vain efforts to pick him up. Not once did he complain.

About half the tourists who came through that day wanted to pet the cute little doggy. Others admired him. A few didn't like dogs. Not being a cat, Tripper didn't force his attentions on that last group. That Saturday the Gnomes also came in to do their dance act.

At first they were all wary of Tripper—Jeff said, "It looks like a fox!"

"No, he's a dog," Mabel corrected. "But he's a good dog, see? Tripper, these are our friends the Gnomes. Be nice to them!"

Only Shmebulock was brave enough to come up and tentatively pat the dog, but Tripper treated him more or less as a young human—nuzzled him and wagged his tail—and finally Jeff got brave enough to come and stroke the puppy's neck. "This is a dog, huh," Jeff said, not making it a question. "We've seen some before, you know. There's a lot of mean dogs in town—I don't think they have homes or human friends. They chase us sometimes. Luckily, we can climb faster than they can run."

"Doesn't Gravity Falls have an animal shelter?" Mabel asked.

"Nope," Wendy said. "Don't think we ever did have one. Used to, if a dog or cat ran off from home, it didn't last long. There are critters around that think they're delicious."

"Werewolves love to eat cats," Jeff confirmed. "And the Woods Gaunts will grab up and eat anything smaller than they are. They used to eat a lot of loose dogs."

"The what?" Dipper asked.

"Woods Gaunt," Jeff said. "It's as tall as a large human male, like the lumberjack man, and it has a great big chest, a real skinny waist, two strong bowed legs, and arms that can reach twice as far as it is tall. Its head is like a bear's skull, sort of, but with a bigger gape and longer fangs. Almost no neck. They hang in the trees and snatch up animals that get too close to the trunk. You just find them up in the high hills. Oh, and a Killbilly will also eat a dog—"

Dipper made a written note of the term "Wood Gaunt" and a mental note to ask Ford about it later—as far as he recalled, and he recalled pretty far, Ford had never mentioned the creature in any of the Journals.

"That's awful!" Mabel exclaimed as Jeff finished his descriptions. "We gotta do something! We've gotta found the Mabel Pines Gravity Falls Humane Animal Center to take care of poor stray animals and find them good homes!"

"Luck with that," Wendy said.

"Don't you think it'd be a good thing?" Mabel demanded.

"It'd be a fine thing," Wendy said. "If you can get people to agree on it and find a place for it and money to build it and somebody who'd staff it and all. I mean, it took, what, thirty years after the dog park was built to open it up to dogs!"

"How'd that even happen?" Dipper asked.

Wendy shrugged. "According to Dad, old Mayor Befufftlefumpter had the dog park built but then thought it was so nice that dogs would only dirty it up, so he banned dogs from it."

"That was kinda nutso," Mabel said.

Wendy nodded. "That was Mayor Befufftlefumpter. Folks said he got a little senile after he passed the age of ninety, but Dad tells me he was always sort of off. Anyways, that was back before Gravity Falls even had a real town council, so the Mayor passed all the laws on his own. Dad says he remembers a time when he—my Dad, I mean—was little and the Mayor outlawed butterflies."

"What? Why?" Mabel asked.

Wendy frowned as she recalled. "Well, he started collecting butterflies and then showed them off at a county fair, only what he'd really collected was just a bunch of dry leaves that he'd cut up into butterfly shapes and pinned to a cork board. He got real mad when they wouldn't fly and in revenge, he banned butterflies."

"But that wouldn't keep them out," Dipper said.

"No, he found that out," Wendy said. "So he passed another law that said any butterfly sighted in Gravity Falls was legally a mutant moth."

"You have to sort of admire him," Mabel said. "He had an answer for everything!"

* * *

The work day ended, Teek and Mabel took Tripper to the now-available dog park, and Dipper and Wendy had another movie night. Except they didn't even try to watch a movie. The Corduroy house wasn't air-conditioned, and turning on a fan didn't help all that much. Too hot to joke about bad movies, they decided.

Instead they had one of their mental make-out sessions—they worked off a lot of tension that way—and then later went outside (the night was still sweltering), spread out a blanket on a grassy bank, and lay back and looked up at the stars, still dancing in heat-shimmers even at ten PM.

They held hands, shared thoughts and dreams and just . . . drifted. Had the temperature been fifteen degrees lower, it would have been perfect.

Because Teek and Mabel got back to the Shack first, Mabel fed Tripper and put him to bed, up in the attic. Dipper wasn't home—Mabel didn't expect him until midnight, the rapscallion—so Mabel stretched out on her old bed with Tripper beside her and read for an hour or so.

And Tripper fell asleep with an assortment of doggy sighs and huffs. And dreamed.

 _You've seen dreaming dogs. Their legs twitch as they chase imaginary bunnies. They may even woof to scare away a formless doggy nightmare. Sometimes they even wake themselves up and leap out of bed, wild-eyed, staring all around for whatever had disturbed their slumbers._

 _However, Tripper dreamed without any stir. He saw the cage in the woods with the golden thing inside it, and he sensed that it either stood on, or was, a chasm. A split in reality. Get too close to it and you might lose your mind, or be pulled through into horror. And something on the other side was trying hard to pry it open._

 _He didn't know what. Awful things. Things that hated his friends and meant them harm. Inchoate, half-formed monstrosities, hungry and furious._

 _And he was so small compared to them. But in the dream he stood guard, ready to give up his life if he had to, to keep his friends safe._

 _Something invisible growled a half-heard threat._

 _And in his dream, all Tripper could do was lift his right front paw over and over: No! No! No. . . ._


	9. Chapter 9

**Dog Days**

 **(Sunday, July 31, 2016)**

* * *

 **9: At the Lake and in the Woods**

Sunday afternoon, a glorious free time for Dipper and Mabel—no work to do, since the Shack was closed, no baby-sitting, since Abuelita, Soos, and Melody took the kids to Mass and then entertained them all afternoon, in fact they had absolutely nothing to do but enjoy the—admittedly very hot—day.

For the second day in a row, the temperature was climbing into three digits, the weatherman said, and the hot spell would be broken only when an expected cool front pushed in from Canada, bringing rain showers and possible thunderstorms. That might happen Monday afternoon or night, so—best get in some relaxing time while they could enjoy it. It was an oddly breathless day, the trees drooping in the still, humid air. Stepping outside felt a little like stepping into a van that had been parked in the sun all day.

Dipper and Wendy rolled all the windows down and drove her car to Lake Gravity Falls, where she tutored him in swimming. He had always been terrible at it, but little by little with his determined practice and Wendy's patience with him, he was improving.

Now he could do at least a creditable crawl stroke out to the float and back without floundering or choking. He could also do a sidestroke and butterfly stroke, though he found both of these more awkward. As he gained confidence, he gradually stopped assaulting the water and instead let it hold him up. When he cooperated with it, he didn't tire himself out. Sometimes he wondered what he might have done if someone had started to drown back during the summer of 2012, when for like three days he was an assistant life guard.

Throw them a rope, maybe. Or hold out the pool skimmer so they could grab it and be dragged to safety. He sure wouldn't have been much good trying to swim in and save them.

That Sunday, after getting into their swim togs, he and Wendy swam out to the float a hundred feet from shore and climbed aboard it, together with about six other teens, all in couples, who were giggling and chattering. "Not too shabby, Dip," Wendy said, holding out a hand to help him up the ladder. "I'm still faster than you, but you're getting into a pretty fair swimming form. Poolcheck might even hire you back as a lifeguard now."

"Don't even want to audition," Dipper said, wiping water from his eyes. Once he would also have rearranged his hair, since swimming plastered it back and revealed his birthmark, but now, with Wendy as moral support, it just didn't seem to matter that much if anybody saw it. The two of them found an empty space to sit on the hot, splintered gray wood at the back of the float, looking out over the water toward Scuttlebutt Island, and they settled down, their feet dangling over the edge. It wasn't even noon, but a hard, hot sun beat down from a cloudless sky and speared from the blue lake in a thousand jagged reflections.

Sitting there next to Wendy, Dipper couldn't help thinking of the night a couple of weeks back after she'd had a little too much beer—her dad had given it to her, because he wanted to quiz her about her boyfriend, and as the Romans said, _in vino veritas_. Or maybe in this case _in brewth there's truth._

Anyway, that night she had him drive her out here way after dark and they went swimming together. And in the moonlight, she didn't wear her red suit . . . or anything. And neither had he.

"Ah, you're thinkin' about that night," Wendy teased. Her thigh was touching his, and of course she could read his mind.

Not wanting to be overheard by the others on the float, Dipper answered her telepathically: — _Well, yeah, Magic Girl. It was only the high point of my whole life!_

She chuckled but responded mentally as well _: Mm, well, it kinda left me hanging, but I guess it gives us a goal to aim for later on. We'll have to see if we can beat it for awesomeness one day._ Wendy tossed back her wet hair—it was growing long again after she'd had it cut short the previous winter and now reached way down past her shoulders—and thought to him, _Wonder what all these people would think if they knew you and I went swimming in the nude that time._

— _That I'm the luckiest guy in the world. And the dopiest, since swimming and talking was all we did!_

She took his hand in hers. _I respect you for that, Dip. Seriously, at the time I was all torn out of the frame over talkin' with my Dad about you and my Mom and all, and he'd got me pretty much buzzed, and I guess my inhibitions were down—well, I'll just say if you'd tried anything, I wouldn't have hated it. But no, you were right to say we had to wait, and I'm glad. I'm also glad you didn't have even one beer!_

— _Can't stand it. It tastes horrible to me. Maybe I'm not just old enough to appreciate it. Better watch me when the pressure gets bad in college, though, and make sure I don't become a drunk!_

 _Don't think there's much chance of that, Big Dipper. Stan has, like, one beer in the evening sometimes and always stops at that. I've only ever seen Ford sip one teeny glass of wine in a restaurant. Your dad doesn't drink, either, does he?_

— _Dad? No, he's like Ford—sometimes a beer or glass of wine in a restaurant, but aside from that, no. Mom's the same._

 _See, you weren't raised around it, like me. There's always at least two six-packs in the Corduroy fridge, and nobody notices if you sneak one. 'Course my dad can drink enough to put a moose under the table and still not hardly show any effects. And then in high school, I hung around with a rebellious bunch. Robbie would steal beers from his folks, and sometimes Thompson would buy 'em for him, Nate, and Lee. Tambry and I would join the guys in drinking beer once in a while when we shouldn't have. But we just got buzzed, not what you'd call drunk. I shouldn't even drink just now and then, though. Peer pressure can get you into some bad decisions, man._

— _I don't have to worry about my high-school friends getting me to drink._

Wendy squeezed his hand. "'Cause you don't have many," she said so softly that only he could hear. "My poor guy."

By then, all the other couples had jumped back into the water. Maybe they were part of a group. Anyway, the rest of the teens had left the float, temporarily at least, to Dipper and Wendy. He shrugged. "Well, it's OK. I'm not antisocial, just not very good at being social. I have a few buddies on track team, you know, but we're not supposed to touch beer or anything. If somebody did drink and anyone found out about it and told, the guy would get cut from the team pretty quick. How'd we even get on this subject?"

"By my thanking you for being a gentleman that night when, um, nothing stood between us, dude."

"Oh, yeah." Dipper felt his face reddening, and not from the sun. He added, "Maybe one day we can try that again when you don't need to clear your head. Just to see how it goes."

"It's a date," Wendy told him. She gave him a playful elbow nudge. "Tomorrow?"

"Um, too soon," Dipper said. Silently, he asked, _What's up with you? Are you feeling, uh, you know—_

He could feel her amusement. _Horny? Maybe a little. I get that way now and then. Of course, you wouldn't know, you never do that—_

Despite himself, Dipper had to laugh. She knew very well how untrue that was.

 _It's cool, Dip. Just part of growing up, that's all. It's just, I dunno, lately I keep daydreaming about next summer, when you turn eighteen. I am so looking forward to that._

"Me too," he said. No one seemed to be paying attention, so they kissed, just once.

After an hour at the lake, they swam ashore, got dressed, and drove back to the Shack—Wendy, fair-skinned as she was, burned if she didn't use a high-powered sunscreen and refresh it so often that, she said, she started to feel like a sardine packed in oil. And it was miserably hot at the lake, even standing in the water.

Teek's and Mabel's cars both stood in the lot, and Tripper came dancing to the door to greet them as they came in. "Hi!" Dipper called. "The Ramirezes gone somewhere?"

"We're in the dining room!" Mabel called. "Yeah, they took the kids to Fairyland. We're having lunch."

"Little late for lunch," Wendy said. It was twenty before two. She and Dipper found Teek at the counter making turkey sandwiches and Mabel brewing mint tea.

"What's Fairyland?" Dipper asked.

"It's a little amusement park west of Hirschville on 126," Teek said. "You want sandwiches?"

"I'll make 'em," Wendy volunteered. "You and Mabes go ahead and start eating."

"Didn't know there was an amusement park anywhere around," Dipper said, getting out glasses and dishes for himself and Wendy.

"It's not big," Teek said as he took two sandwiches to the table, where Mabel had just set down their iced tea and a squeeze bottle of honey. "Maybe thirty acres or a little more. They have a carousel, little train ride, toddler playground, log flume ride, games, fairy-tale characters, all that kind of stuff. Little kids like it."

"Want some iced tea?" Mabel asked, rattling her glass. "It's got mint in it!"

"Talked me into it," Wendy said, spreading mustard on bread. "Dip, get me a glass with ice, please, and pour me some."

"I'm on it."

They had tasty sandwiches—turkey, a semi-spicy Dijon mustard, sliced tomatoes (Dipper had learned to tolerate them), lettuce, and sweet little pickles on the side. "How was the dog park?" Dipper asked.

Around a mouthful of sandwich, Mabel said, "Good! Tripper's such a good boy. Kinda shy of the other dogs, but he doesn't growl or anything. And he'll romp a little with them, but he loves most to play with me and Teek. You ought to see him chase a tennis ball! He never gets tired."

Tripper was sitting near the table, his gaze intent on whoever happened to be taking a bite. "I like how he doesn't beg," Wendy said. "That's a mature dog trait right there, not mooching for people food."

Mabel tossed him a little scrap of turkey anyway, and he fielded it like a pro.

After Teek and Dipper cleaned up—Mabel told Wendy "I like how you're training him", meaning her brother and not the dog—Dipper asked, "Mind if we take Tripper out for a walk?"

Tripper started to bounce like a furry rubber ball at the word "walk."

"Where you going?" Mabel asked. "If it's someplace cool, and I don't mean trendy, we may tag along. It got too hot in the dog park—hardly any shade."

"I thought we'd walk out to the Cipher effigy," Dipper said. "We ought to keep an eye on it, in case anything happens."

Tripper stopped leaping and sat with his ears held back.

"You're scaring Tripper," Mabel said.

Dipper asked, "Are you afraid, boy?"

After some moments of hesitation, Tripper held up his left paw. "He says no," Wendy translated.

"I know, he can answer questions," Mabel said. "Hey, let me show you something amazing! Let's go into the gift shop."

They did, and Mabel had them sit on the floor, "in a circle" as she said, though really they more or less sat on the corners of an imaginary cube about eight feet on a side. Then Mabel said, "Tripper! Center!"

The dog went to the middle of the room and sat down.

"OK," Mabel said. "Go to, um—Wendy!"

The dog stepped over to Wendy, who petted him and fussed over him. "What a good boy! OK, let me try. Now go to Teek."

Tripper did. Teek sent him to Mabel, who sent him to Dipper. He never made a mistake or even hesitated. Dipper tried something more complicated. "Tripper, show me Mabel's shoe."

He went to Mabel and put a paw on her left foot. "Good," Dipper said. "Now, where's my hat?"

Tripper came to him, stood on his hind legs, and pointed with his nose.

"This really is amazing!" Wendy said. "Tripper, where does Dipper sit?"

The dog trotted behind the counter and gave one lone yip from roughly where Dipper's stool sat when he was on the cash register. When they put a ball, a rubber bone, a block of wood, and Mabel's key chain on the floor, he could go and fetch whichever one they asked for. Dipper tested for the Clever Hans effect by going into the museum, where Tripper couldn't see him, and calling through the open door for the block.

Tripper brought the block and dropped it at Dipper's feet.

"Spooky smart," Dipper said, returning to the gift shop. He glanced at Wendy. "You up for the walk?"

"Well, it'll be shady in the woods, so OK. Long as we don't get too close to the thing," she said. "I still dream about Cipher sometimes. He gives me the willies."

"We'll go too," Mabel said, getting up. "What weapons do we carry?"

"I think your grappling hook will be enough," Dipper said.

But Mabel insisted, and in the end, she took a putter. Teek had one of Stan's baseball bats, Dipper took along a whip—it was actually a toy, but made of braided leather and six feet long and he'd taught himself to crack it after weeks of practice one summer. Mabel said the coiled whip on his belt made him look like Idaho Smith, not Indiana Jones, but whatever.

And Wendy donned her scabbard and took the axe that Dipper had asked a blacksmith to silver-coat for her. It was one of her favorites, short-handled but good for throwing as well as for wielding as a hand weapon.

Only Tripper went unarmed, though Dipper was beginning to wonder just how smart the dog might be. It was even possible that he could handle a small weapon—though what kind, Dipper couldn't say.

They all were uneasy. Dipper noticed that even Mabel didn't talk. Tripper was off the leash, but he stayed a step behind Dipper the whole way. There was no real trail to the effigy—hardly anybody even knew it was there, and few who did know wanted to visit it—but Dipper found the easiest way to thread through the underbrush.

When they reached the clearing, they heard the faint buzzing of the gold bugs, droning in, landing, leaving their little coating of gold, and flying away again. Bill's broken-off arm now looked complete to a little way past the elbow. The rest of the stone glittered. It all now had a thin coating of gold dust.

"It's _throbbing_ , dudes," Wendy muttered.

Maybe that wasn't exactly the word, but yes, somehow the effigy seemed to pulsate—not physically, but somehow the air around it darkened and then lightened again, to a slow, monotonous rhythm. It was as though cloud shadows passed over it in regular procession. Tripper became agitated, running in front of the group and dancing from side to side, like a doggy goalie protecting the goal.

Dipper took a video of the effigy, hoping to capture the strange lighting effect. "I think Grunkle Ford ought to know about this," he said. "Everybody but Wendy, back off, please. I'm going to see if I can dip into the Mindscape and get in touch with Bill's, uh, good side."

"Brobro!" Mabel said. "He doesn't _have_ a good side! He's like a Mobius strip of evil!"

"No, I can usually sense if he's being trustworthy or not," Dipper said. "Please, back away a little. And hold onto Tripper."

Mabel pulled the leash from her pocket, hooked it to the dog's collar, and she, Tripper, and Teek backed off about ten feet.

Dipper sat on a fallen log—how many times before had he communed with Bill from there? He reached for Wendy's hand and, holding it, sent himself into an autohypnotic trance.

He made it into the Mindscape, but couldn't sense or hear Bill. If he focused on the effigy in its cage, he had a sense of movement—sort of like a whirlwind of darkness settling in all around the statue.

Someone small came to sit beside him. If he looked head-on, no one was there. If he turned his gaze back toward the statue, the small white figure was sitting by his side, like a Gnome in a white robe.

"It's you, isn't it, Tripper?" Dipper's dream-self asked.

"Yes."

"Are we in danger here?"

"Yes. No. Think so."

"Should we leave?"

He heard a thin whine, then, "Want to."

"I'm waking myself up now."

Dipper opened his eyes and was surprised that no dog sat beside him. He stood, taking Wendy's hand. "Let's go," he said. "We can't do anything here. I'll have to call Ford again."

On the way back to the shack, a happy Tripper, off his leash again, pranced along in front of them. Only rarely did he pause to look back over his shoulder, not at the kids, but in the direction of the effigy.

And only at those times did lower his ears, glare with bared teeth, he bristle, and growl a warning.


	10. Chapter 10

**Dog Days**

 **(Monday, August 1, 2016)**

* * *

 **10: From the Laboratory Notes of Dr. Stanford Pines, Ph.D., .Ph., M.D., etc. etc.**

 _Interim report on Subject Cf-1._

The subject is a physically healthy, somewhat undernourished specimen of _Canis familiaris,_ specifically a specimen of the breed "Carolina dog" (designation currently under review by the American Kennel Club, but acceptance seems likely within the year—see internet site akc org/ dog-breeds / carolina-dog /). Specimen weighs 5.58 kg, is alert and responsive to commands, and appears to understand human language much more readily than the average dog.

Query: Is this because of the dog's ancestry? Designated as "primitive dog," having characteristics similar to images and skeletal remains from ancient India. Should research.

 _Stage 1: Testing Cf-1 for ability to understand English_

Procedure: Cf-1 was isolated in a room with a camera to record observations. On a low shelf accessible to Cf-1 were ten different items: golf ball, tennis ball, baseball; yellow wooden blocks in the forms of a triangle, cube, and rectangle; stuffed toys representing a rabbit, a squirrel, and an oversized ladybug; and as a control, a soup bone.

Two human assistants, M.P. and M.(D.)P., familiarized Cf-1 with the objects, naming them and letting the animal pick them up and sniff them. After fifteen minutes, M.P. warned the subject not to touch the items until he heard a command. The animal was left in the room with a pad on the floor and the items. The closed-circuit camera was in operation.

For five minutes, the subject lay on the pad. It would intermittently look around, but never approached the shelf or the items. Then over a speaker, M.P. gave the command to "move the yellow cube to the right end of the shelf."

Cf-1 rose, approached the shelf, took the cube in his mouth, and transferred to the right of the soup bone, then returned to his pad. M.P. gave him a string of instructions, having him sort the items by size, by material, color, etc. Some tasks took Cf-1 longer than others, but the subject accomplished them all without error.

Cf-1 has been taught paw signals for reposes "yes" and "no," specifically to raise his right paw for "yes" and his left for "no."

Once phase one had been completed, M.(D.)P. took over as communicator. Again, he was isolated from the room in which the subject waited. Over the speaker, he asked Cf-1 to face away from the shelf (thus the subject turned and faced the camera) and to answer ten questions.

1\. Is the tennis ball yellow? (Response: yes. The ball is a greenish-yellow tint, which dogs would perceive as yellow)

2\. Is the triangle round? (Response: no)

3\. Is the ladybug round? (Response, after hesitation: yes. The toy is like half a sphere and so is more round than any other simple shape definition)

4\. Is the squirrel on the shelf a real animal? (Response: no)

4-A. (At my suggestion) Are there squirrels who are real animals? (Response: yes)

5\. Can you eat the cube? (Response: no)

6\. Can you eat the bone? (Response: yes)

7\. Can you show us how many blocks there are? What is the number? (Response: Cf-1 glanced at the shelf, then tapped out 3 with his paw)

8\. How many of these things have fur? (Response: two taps. The ladybug is made of tough canvas, but the rabbit and squirrel toys have fake fur)

9\. Do you think you have done well on this test? (Response: yes)

10\. Do you like M.? (Response: enthusiastic wags of tail, yes)

* * *

I will supply an addendum with the next phase of testing, since it was recorded on video and frankly must be seen to be appreciated. In summary, the subject appears to have a phenomenal level of understanding of both spoken and written English. Even when shielded from the Clever Hans effect, it responds correctly more than ninety per cent of the time and showed evidence of being able to read such words as "dog," "bed," "ball," "shelf," "left," and "right," among others. That will be dealt with in the video addendum.

* * *

 _Stage 2: Debriefing_

Satisfied that the subject had a satisfactory level of understanding, and using my two helpers as intermediaries, I questioned the subject regarding a number of concerns. The following will distill the responses from "yes/no" questions and from limited spelling-out, which is difficult for the subject.

 **THE FOLLOWING BEARS A CODE U SECURITY LEVEL.**

The origins of the dog's increased intelligence: I surmise it has something to do with Artifact Prime-1 (see secret files, GF-Anomalies). The subject has a memory of sleeping on the hill above the buried relic before somehow becoming conscious of higher levels of thinking.

The stone effigy BC-42 (see secret files, GF-Anomalies). Cf-1 senses what I can only call a fragility effect near BC-42: the feeling, the intuition, that the area has a more tenuous reality than any other location. Further, Cf-1 thinks—yes, I now firmly believe that a dog can reason and form conclusions, or at least this one can—thinks that something from "outside" is working to use the object to penetrate our reality. See notes on the Nightmare Realm, Journals 3 and 4, Stanford F. Pines.

My human aide M.(D.)P. has some psychic connection with the remnants of the entity BC-1 (see secret file "Dip-Psy"). He is convinced that the entity called "Bill Cipher" (my designation is BC-1; see extensive notes in Journals 2, 3, and 4, by Stanford F. Pines) is NOT behind whatever is happening with the effigy BC-42.

Hypothesis: Entities left in the Nightmare Realm after the closing of the Rift in August 2012 (see secret monograph "Weirdmageddon: A History," by Stanford F. Pines) are attempting to lever the remnants of entity BC-1, represented by the effigy, to gain admission to our reality.

Problem: Destroying the effigy may speed the process of breaching the walls of reality along. More study urgently needed!

Next steps: Keep Cf-1 in the process. Treat him not as a lab animal, but as a partner. Believe what he says—he seems unfamiliar with the term "lying" and unable to do it.

KEEP HUMAN HELPERS AND THEIR FRIENDS SAFE.

At all costs, keep them safe. At ALL costs.


	11. Chapter 11

**Dog Days**

 **(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)**

* * *

 **11: Dispatches from the Nightmare Realm**

The phone began to ring. Two times. Three.

"Come on, come on," Billy Sheaffer whispered. His breath was coming rapidly, his heart pounding. He couldn't raise his voice—his sisters were asleep in the adjoining bedroom, and they woke up at night if he even flushed the toilet. As it was, he'd already had to sneak into the downstairs hall, stepping carefully so the stairs under his bare feet didn't creak, to bring the phone up to his room. Maybe he could talk his parents into getting him a real cell phone—

"Hello?" A sleepy voice, very groggy-sounding, on the other end.

With the covers and the pillow over him, Billy said in a hoarse whisper, "Dipper? It's me."

He could hear Dipper taking a deep breath and suppressing a yawn. "Humh? Billy? Um. Wha—what time is it?"

It felt as if Billy couldn't get enough air in his lungs. He tried to force himself to breathe easier. "Little after three in the morning. I'm sorry. I had to call you."

"What's happened?" Dipper asked, sounding alert.

 _He's not mad at me_. The thought flashed through Billy, and at least there was that. "It's probably nothing," he mumbled, suddenly ashamed of his own fear. Now the words seemed to catch in his throat, but he tried to keep his volume low as he forced them out: "I—it—I have bad dreams sometimes. You know that. W-well, I—I just had a real bad one."

"Catch your breath and slow down. It's all right. Tell me about it," Dipper said.

"Well—something about lightning and a key, I think? Or a combination, you kn-know, to o-open a l-lock? And you know, that triangle thing, it gl-glowed and guh-got surrounded in like a ball of white-hot fire, and—and monsters came out."

"Monsters?"

"Yeah, out, out of the ball of fuh-fire. They fuh-flew or ho-hovered, like in a muh-movie. There was a—a one-eyed, burning woman, I think, and something that looked like an evil baby and a, a, k-kind of a s-snake only it was b-built out of s-squares and h-had too many eyes, oh, and other cr-crazy stuff. And they a-all attacked the Mystery Shack, but for s-some r-reason they couldn't get t-to you, but wuh-Wendy was running through the ruh-rain and she duh-didn't see them, and—and—Dipper, they _got_ her!" His throat closed and for the moment he couldn't talk. It felt as if his heart would break through his rib cage. Awake, he re-lived his sleeping terror.

"Take a deep breath," Dipper said quietly. "Calm down, Billy. It's OK, understand? Just a dream. It wasn't real. That hasn't happened."

Billy gulped hard, because a painful lump seemed to block his voice. The next was terrible to say, and he hated to do it, but he knew he had to tell his friend—that for some reason was vital. He swallowed again and stammered, "Buh-but the wuh-worst was—I c-caused it! I d-don't know how, but I c-caused it to huh-happen! And, and they guh-got We-Wendy and duh-dragged her away suh-screaming!"

"But it didn't happen," Dipper said firmly. "It was a bad nightmare, but not real."

"I'll ne-never le-learn h-how to be g-good," Billy sobbed For some reason that bothered him most of all—the crushing sense of guilt that he, somehow, was responsible for what happened in the dream.

"Sh, sh. That's not right, Billy. I mean you're mistaken. Look, it's good that you called me. Even this early. It's really good, Billy. Maybe you had a prophetic dream—one that shows what might happen, a warning dream. I can help now, and I couldn't if you hadn't called. So you did good, man. Calm down now. Go back to sleep, OK?"

Billy couldn't stop sobbing. "I, I'll t-try. B-but please. Can you p-please c-call me later on? To t-tell me that We-Wendy's OK?"

"Sure," Dipper said. "But you hang up now and let me get to work on this. Just calm down."

"OK, Th-thanks for l-listening." Billy paused, biting his lip, and then in a rush said, "Please don't let anything happen to Red!" He punched the _off_ button, wondering where that had come from. _Red?_

He emerged from under the covers and froze with shock. His dad was standing in the doorway, the pale yellow light from the landing night-light outlining him there in the ridiculous baggy candy-striped pajamas that Billy's sisters had given him for Christmas the past winter. "Billy," Dad said, "why are you calling somebody at this hour?"

Miserably, Billy sat up in bed and said, "I h-had a ruh-real b-bad d-dream about some f-friends and w-wanted to m-make s-sure they w-weren't d-d-dead."

Dad came into his room and sat on the edge of the bed, in the illumination seeping in from the bedroom doorway. He reached for the phone and Billy handed it to him. "Hello?" he said into the receiver. After a moment, he clicked the _off_ button. "They must've already hung up. Was your friend OK?" Dr. Sheaffer asked.

Billy could only nod. The hot tears poured down his face—from his only good eye.

"Well, then," Dad said with a smile, "you did the right thing. I'll take the phone back down and hang it up for you. You going to be all right now?"

Billy nodded, and Dad got up. But before he could reach the door, Billy sprang out of bed and all but yelled, "Dad, w-wait!"

Dr. Sheaffer turned around as Billy crashed into him, hugging him. "D-don't g-go yet. Dad, I'm s-still scared. I l-love you, Dad."

"Well, don't trip me then," Dad said lightly. He set the phone down on the desk and picked Billy up, as if he were a little kid again, and carried him to the bed. "I'll sit here with you for a while. And by the way, kiddo, your mom and your sisters and I—we all love you, too."

The strangest thought crossed Billy's mind—not relief, not happiness, even, but just the rational thought, _This is it. This is what I always looked for, over eons uncounted_. But the thought evaporated like a wisp of steam, he forgot it instantly, and he lay back in the bed with just a sheet over him—it was a warm night in Piedmont.

And his dad pulled up a chair beside the bed and held Billy's small hand in his big one until the boy finally sank back into sleep.

* * *

"Dip?" Wendy whispered, "What's up, man? It's, uh, a quarter past three!"

"I know," Dipper told her. "And it's crazy, but this is Gravity Falls, and I just got a warning from Billy Sheaffer that something bad's gonna happen today just before you get here. He thinks you might be in danger. He, uh, OK, he even called you 'Red.' Something's up. So could you come right now instead of waiting?"

"At this hour?" Dipper could hear the rustle of her getting out of bed. "Sounds like it's pouring, too."

"Yeah, raining hard," Dipper said. Up in the attic, the downpour pounded on the roof, but at least Soos had reshingled and it no longer dripped through as it once had. "Can you come, though?"

"Well, yeah, man! I'll leave a note for Dad, say that Soos needed me early or something. The guys can cook their own breakfast for a change. Be there in twenty minutes."

"Park close," Dipper said. "Close as you can. And run to the Shack as hard as you ever ran in your life. I have to call Ford."

"Man," Wendy said. "Here we are so close to your birthday and crap like this comes up, right? Do what you have to do, Dip. Be there in twenty, and, oh, yeah almost forgot, I love you."

"Love you, too, Magic Girl. Hurry!"

* * *

Stanford Pines had long since adjusted to getting his sleep in snatches instead of in one uninterrupted night, and his years of dimension-hopping had taught him to come awake in a heartbeat. He answered on the first ring, his voice clear and crisp: "Mason?"

"Listen," Dipper said, and his great-uncle listened without interrupting while he told of what Billy had said.

"Lightning," Ford said. "I had not thought of that! Immense power in a sudden burst—though the cage Fiddleford put up around the effigy should intercept the bolt and ground it. Unless the energy could be seized and channeled by the—I'll be there in ten minutes!"

Dipper got out of bed and threw on some clothes. He met Mabel and Tripper on the stairs coming up. "What's up, Brobro?" Mabel asked quietly but urgently. "Must be bad."

"I—how did you even know?" Dipper asked.

"I dreamed that Tripper wanted me to go to you, and when I woke up, he'd come downstairs and was on my bed licking my face. And the tugged at me and sort of pushed me toward the stairs."

Dipper looked at the dog. "You knew?"

Tripper lifted his right paw.

Dipper ruffled his ears. "OK, you go get dressed, Mabel. I need to wake up Soos."

* * *

Soos and Melody heard him out. "We know the weirdness barrier will protect the Shack," Dipper finished. "So you and the kids and Abuelita stay safe inside—"

"Dude," Soos said, "I'll go along on the mission. You guys may need, like, muscle."

Mabel put her hand on his arm. "Not as much as your kids need a dad. This one time, Soos? Please? For me?"

Soos impulsively hugged her. "For you, Hambone. For you I'll stay."

* * *

Ford got there and came into the gift-shop entrance dripping wet. He carried a black leather satchel. Without even saying hello, he turned to Dipper. "You said Billy had a vision of the lightning striking when Wendy first arrived. When is that normally?"

"Around six forty-five," Dipper said. He glanced at the clock. "So we've got about three hours."

Ford nodded thoughtfully. "Unless Billy's vision took into account her arriving here early." He set the satchel down and handed Dipper and Mabel a quantum destabilizer pistol each. "Don't hit Wendy, whatever you do! I've got my rifle version slung under my coat." He peeled off the dripping trench coat and hung it on an antler of the mounted Jackalope head.

"Wendy's on the way. She should get here in the next five minutes," Dipper said.

Ford turned on all the outside lights, including the sign and the parking lot ones. It didn't help all that much—the night hid behind a silvery curtain of diagonal rain streaks. Dipper kept checking to make sure his pistol held a full charge. It did. And it did. And it did again. "Come on, come on," he muttered.

"Hey! Here comes something!" Mabel yelled. "A headless monster!"

And for a second it did look like that, a humanoid form with a humped set of shoulders but no head shambling toward them in a fast run. Ford pushed down Mabel's pistol, though, before she could fire. "No!"

And Stanley, wearing a raincoat that he'd pulled up to cover his head, scrambled up the steps. "Nice weather for a picnic, Poindexter," he growled. "Who're you knuckleheads gonna shoot?"

"I forgot to tell you I called my brother," Ford apologized.

Stan impatiently waved him off. "Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna grab a cup of coffee. Be two minutes." He pushed past them into the Shack.

"Can Grunkle Stan help?" Dipper asked.

Ford said, "I don't know. But he's saved our lives before. Would you not tell him?"

"Pines! Pines! Pines!" Mabel chanted.

"No," Dipper said, feeling a sense of relief that they were all in this together. "I guess I wouldn't not tell him."

"I hear a car," Ford said.

They saw rain-blurred headlights as the Green Machine jolted into the lot. Wendy pulled right up to the low wood rail, front bumper nearly touching it. She killed the engine and headlights and jumped out, splashing a spray of ankle-deep water, already running. Dipper saw she was holding her axe.

She darted up onto the porch and Dipper hugged her. "You made it and you're safe!" he said.

"And wet!" she shot back, breaking out of the damp embrace. She hadn't worn a raincoat, and in the short run the heavy rain had plastered down her red hair and her green-plaid shirt. "Let me go change into something dry. I'm gonna borrow one of those slickers in the employee room, too. Didn't have the sense to grab a raincoat."

She and Stan were back within minutes. Stan had found a hat—a fedora that some tourist had forgotten—and had jammed it on his head, and Wendy looked strange in an oversized hooded rain slicker, PVC-coated polyester. Stan wordlessly handed Dipper and Mabel a couple of the cheap rain ponchos the Shack sometimes sold tourists on rainy days. He shook his head at Wendy's appearance and actually chuckled at her as he took big gulps of steaming black coffee.

She ignored him and asked, "OK, dudes, what's the plan?"

"I have a _sort_ of one," Ford said. "It's risky and will be difficult in this weather, but—well, it may be the best we can do." He hefted his satchel. "This," he said, "contains seven moonstones and—I hope—just enough unicorn hair to surround the enclosure around the Cipher effigy."

"Wait, what?" Mabel said. "Sorry for stealing your catch phrase, Brobro. Grunkle Ford, that's cray-cray! Won't that just keep monsters _away_ from the statue?"

"Think about Weirdmageddon," Ford urged. "Remember? Gravity Falls has its own huge weirdness field, and when the Rift ruptured, the field still contained the demonic forces from the Nightmare Realm who got into the valley—got here, but they couldn't get out! A magical barrier works both ways!"

"Yeah," Stan said. "That was why the boogie-boogies couldn't take over the world, right? The monsters got trapped right here in Gravity Falls with all our friends and relations, lucky us! I don't remember it so good, but you told me about it."

"So," Dipper said, "we can clamp a lid over the effigy. Anything that might come through from another dimension would still be confined inside it!"

"And," Ford said with grim satisfaction, "though nothing from another dimension could penetrate the barrier, that impenetrability doesn't hold true of beams from quantum destabilizers."

"Like shooting monsters in a fish barrel made of unicorn magic!" Mabel said. "Pew! Pew!"

"Let's roll," Wendy said.

"Soos!" Dipper called, running back into the gift shop with Tripper at his heels. "Need your help, man!"

"Anything, dawg!" Soos said. "You got it, you name it. Wait a minute. Uh, strike that, dawg, and reverse it, OK? All of a sudden I'm, like, craving chocolate."

Dipper hooked Tripper's lead onto his collar. "You hang onto Tripper and keep him safe, too," Dipper said. "I don't know how he'd react if things got bad."

Soos took the leash. "Sure thing, dawg."

For some reason, Dipper hesitated. Then with a shy grin, he held out a fist. "Thanks, pterodactyl bro."

Grinning all over his face, Soos fist-bumped and said, "Boosh!"

"Hurry, Mason, please!" Ford yelled from the porch. "We may not have much time. We just saw a bolt of—"

Thunder rolled.


	12. Chapter 12

**Dog Days**

 **(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)**

* * *

 **12: Bolt**

Dipper had never been out in harder rain. That time when they had slogged through the mud toward the Gack of Doom, maybe as hard, but no harder. Blinding and cold, it slashed at his face and neck, a whip wielded by the unforgiving wind. Twice hail fell, too, in hard sudden drum solos, peppering him with stinging little blows. "If we're too late," he yelled at the top of his lungs, and a gust of wind took his breath away.

"Negative!" Ford shouted. "I counted the seconds until the thunder, and that first lightning bolt was five miles away! But hurry!"

The storm didn't want them to go. The wind was against them, trying to push them back to the Shack. Bent double against it, they sloshed down the Mystery Trail, finally turned into the woods—everybody always said to stay away from trees in a lightning storm!—and ignored the briars and slapping brush.

Nothing looked the way it should. The trees flailed and thrashed like living animals, maybe ones in their death throes. The rain and the tumbling windblown leaves obscured all landmarks. They got lost, found themselves back on the Mystery Trail, and then Wendy shouted, "I think I can find it!" She took the lantern and led the way.

"Most direct path!" Ford yelled. "Never mind finding an easy way!"

So they waded through thorny vines and stumbled over fallen tree trunks, Dipper following the gleam of the lantern in her hand, no longer even trying to orient himself. "Got it!" she called over her shoulder. "Bear left, everybody!"

They staggered out into the clearing. Ford reclaimed the lantern and set it on the fallen beam and said, "We lost a lot of time! The ritual takes an hour, and we may not have that long. Stanley! You dig! At least six inches deep, no more than a foot! I'll show you where the holes need to be!" He handed Stan a folding shovel, an entrenching tool, and pointed to the sodden earth. "Scrape the pine needles away and start here!"

"I'm in charge of unicorn hair!" Mabel yelled. "Dipper will help me lay it down!"

Ford handed her a sack. "Right, here you are. Weave it through the metal bars, and make sure it touches the ground. Tie it off every third bar—we can't let the wind blow it off. Wendy, you help me plant the moonstones. Stanley, first hole here, three feet away from the metal cage!"

The rain slackened and then fell harder again. They heard thunder, not too close at first, but by the third time, it had gained a lot of ground. The unicorn hair was uncanny stuff. The strands felt short, but when you pulled, they stretched into three-foot-long hanks. In the dark, they gleamed with a light that was near to the ultraviolet, and the felt warm and pulsating in his grip. He noticed that whenever Mabel held a tress of the mane hair, it glowed especially bright. "'S how you know I'm a virgin," she said in a voice only Dipper could hear. "So there!"

"Fine," he shot back.

But then she laughed. "It's glowing some for you, too, Dip, so I guess you're mostly pure of heart! Wonder if we can get Wendy to hold it—"

"I don't care," Dipper said. "Help me here!"

The twins wove the unicorn hair in and out of the metal bands— _be great if the lightning hit right, now, we'd be fried!—_ until they had surrounded the statue. "Finished!" Mabel yelled.

"Step back. Well back!" Ford yelled, stooping to plant and cover another moonstone. "Wendy, how are you doing?"

She had just dropped a moonstone in the last hole, and she used her boot to scrape dirt in to cover it. "Don't wait on me! There! Done!"

"Back, everyone! Stand back!" Ford stepped all the way behind the lantern, ten feet away from the effigy, and with its light shining up from below to make him look extraordinarily creepy, he raised his arms and chanted something in no language the Dipper recognized.

For an instant, a half-globe of purple energy shimmered around the cage. "That's done it!" Ford shouted. "What time is—"

He didn't finish the question. A blinding bolt of lightning crackled down, making a direct hit on top of the dome of steel strips, so close that Dipper felt it suck the air out of his lungs, heard the wicked crackle, before the _boom_ of the shockwave tumbled him back and made his ears ring, felt the hellish heat of a near-miss encounter with lightning wash over him.

He rolled to hands and knees and then grabbed a springy sapling and tried to stand. It took him three tries before he made it up and stood blinking and shaking his head. He could see nothing for some moments, except a red afterimage of a crooked, writhing bolt of lightning. "Everyone OK?" Ford's voice sounded distant, echoing and hollow, as if Dipper were hearing it from underwater, but he yelled, "Wendy?"

She put a hand on his shoulder, startling him. "Right here, Dip! Mabes? Stan? Where are you? You all right?"

They both where, but Stan was grumbling because the blast had knocked his fedora off his head, and he couldn't find it.

"No loss," his brother said. "You stole it from lost and found to begin with."

"It's the _principle_ of the thing, Poindexter!" Stan yelled. "Blow a man's hat right off his head like that—hey, remind me to tell you the joke about the guy whose wife saw him talkin' to their doctor at a party—"

"Please, later," Ford said.

Wendy brought them back to the moment: "Did we stop it, dudes?"

"Possibly. I hope we have. The lightning did transfer energy," Ford said. "Obviously. Let's see if it was enough for the forces on the other side to force a rift open inside the cage."

They did not approach, but stood on the perimeter, ten feet away, staring. The rain still pelted down, though the drops seemed less fierce, and the wind had dropped off. Wendy found Dipper's hand and clenched it. Mabel went to stand between Ford and Stan.

No more thunder or lightning. The bolt must have been the storm's final parting shot. Wendy sent Dipper a thought: _Six forty-two. I'd be pulling into the parking lot right about now, man._

A red crescent carved itself into the darkness inside the cage.

Dipper squinted No, not a crescent—a long ellipse, seen from the side.

Cipher's eye. Or the effigy's. The pupil, to be exact, was glowing a fierce orange-red.

"It looks like the same color as that big X in the sky," Mabel said.

Oh, yeah, Back during Weirdmageddon, the X that marked the spot where the Nightmare Realm leaked into the waking world. The rift through which all of Bill Cipher's associate had come as they invaded Earth. Dipper remembered.

Something flung itself out of that red glare, something that looked like a monstrosity Soos might stitch up: Not big, but it looked as if somebody had cut a seahorse in half at the waist and had stitched it to the body of a moray eel. And then somehow had brought the chimera to life. It _swam_ through the air, furiously circling the cage of steel, then tried to writhe through the widest part of the gap—

 _Bzzzt!_ The weirdness containment dome flickered into reality and threw it back smoking against the Cipher effigy. It thrashed as if in agony, floated back up, drifting and only weakly moving on its own.

"It's hurt!" Stan said.

"Let me fix that for you," Ford told the creature. He aimed carefully and fired one short blast from his full-sized quantum destabilizer.

The squirming monstrosity exploded into orange sparks, which fell to the wet earth and hissed.

"Hah! One down," Stan said. "Good shot, Sixer! So how many you figure we got left to exterminate?"

"Ninety-seven," Ford said.

Stan laughed. "What a kidder! No, really?"

"Ninety-seven," Ford repeated patiently. "Cipher's magic number is three. His inner circle of henchmaniacs numbered 27—three times three times three. They and his sub-henchmaniacs totaled to 99. Remember, I was fighting them in the Nightmare Realm when your Portal dragged me back to reality. I just destroyed one of the minor ones, leaving 98. And we all remember the Banshee and how we dealt with Xanthar, one of the, um, major league players, and so that leaves ninety-seven henchmaniacs left to go."

"How come Bill makes it a hundred?" growled Stan. "You can't divide that evenly by three!"

"One hundred is the alchemical number of completion," Ford said. "It signifies a degree of perfection. Anyway, don't ask me. IRS mathematics are easier to follow than transdimensional math."

"Heads up! Here comes something else," Wendy warned.

It was a cross between a spider monkey and an octopus. A head with nine tentacles attached to the shoulders of a saved, purple spider monkey (minus a tail). It was hard to tell how big it was—at least eighteen inches, head to toe, Dipper thought. Anyway, it saw them and then fled back through the red cleft in the night before Ford could fire, appearing to shrink as it squirmed into the reddish-orange scar.

"What do we do now?" Stanley asked. "Wait for 'em to come out one at a time so's we can shoot 'em? I hate to yell you, Brainiac, but that only happens in kung-fu movies."

"I saw we wait for the moment. Wait and watch. The rain has ended, anyway."

"Says you," Stanley snarled. "I'm still getting' wet."

"It's just drizzle now," Wendy said. "Plus you're standin' where a big fir tree can drip on you."

"Nuts to this! I'm gonna go find my hat!" Stan announced. He took a pocket flashlight out and started to poke around in the brush.

* * *

A long way south, at the exact moment that the bolt of lightning struck the cage, Billy Sheaffer woke up, his one eye wide and round. Panic gripped him.

"Oh, no," he said in a high-pitched voice unlike his normal one. "No, no, no, no, no! The idiots are trying to break through! This is my last chance! They'll ruin everything!"

A moment later he was wondering what he'd just said. It had seemed there for a second that his mind had . . . expanded? That he had memories of eons that couldn't be real. That he was aware of having lost a fight that he had never had. Now all that was fading like a puff of

A half-remembered incantation was almost on the tip of his tongue: A-X-O-L-O-T-L! My time has come . . . . something. He clenched his hands but could not grasp the memory.

No, it was gone, and as far as he knew, the letters spelled out only a nonsense word.

Gasping, he lay back on the pillow and closed his eye. His head pounded.

 _Don't let it happen! Don't let them come in!_

He didn't know if he was telling himself that, or begging someone else, or some power.

 _No, don't let it happen! I can't lose this. My last chance, no I can't!_

IS THAT THE ONLY REASON?

Billy opened his eye again, but the room was empty, except for him lying in his bed, tangled in the sheet. "Who—who was that? Who said that?"

Nobody, evidently,

But Billy thought hard. Aloud, in a small, frightened voice, he said, "Not the only reason. Not . . . just me."

WHO ELSE?

 _Dipper. Mabel. R—I mean Wendy. Don't want them hurt. Don't want . . . them to die._

WHY NOT?

 _Just don't! I know them! I don't want them to die!_

WHY NOT?

Aloud, Billy sobbed, "Because they're my friends!"

And that felt as if he'd ripped his own heart. "My friends!" he said again in a sob. "It hurts! It hurts so bad! My friends!"

THAT'S GOOD, said the disembodied voice. THAT'S BETTER. FRIENDS. YES, THAT'S BETTER.

In his mind, Billy suddenly saw a little dog.

"Go," he whispered. "Go help them. Please. Please go help my friends."


	13. Chapter 13

**Dog Days**

 **(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)**

* * *

 **13: The Fight in the Clearing**

Gideon Gleeful never used to wake up early. In the old days, he'd lie daydreaming in bed until the last possible minute before getting up, getting dressed, and having him dad drive him to school, breaking the speed limit the whole way. Back then in the summers, he'd laze until ten A.M. and more often than not order his parents to bring him breakfast in bed. If he wanted waffles topped with ice cream, he got it, and his daddy would pick out the nuts. He liked pecan ice cream, but couldn't stand the nuts. Good times, in a way. Lazy days, back when he was ten and eleven years old.

Nowadays, though, he always set his alarm for six-thirty. He'd get up, do his weight-training routine (something he'd actually picked up in prison, coached by the muscular Ghost Eyes), follow that with a half hour of cardio on the treadmill, then shower and have breakfast and, in summer, go over and see what his girlfriend Ulva was up to.

That Tuesday morning as he shut off the alarm, he also picked up his phone and checked his text messages, discovering an unexpected one from Stanford Pines. He read it:

* * *

 _Gideon:_

 _Stanley has told me you were familiar with the Journals and were taken in by Bill Cipher back in the days before Weirdmageddon, and I remember how cruelly he treated you. We other survivors need your help now._

 _You know where the statue of Bill Cipher is in the woods about a mile from the Mystery Shack. Cipher's old allies are now trying to use it as a means of forcing their way into this reality. My brother, Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy are going to go there and try to close it off this morning. We may fail. Just in case, I ask you to get to the Mystery Shack and show this to Soos. I will text him in a moment, and he will be expecting you._

 _Soos, let Gideon into my laboratory._

 _Gideon, you'll find copies of all my Journals in the first-level bookshelves, straight ahead and to the right at the bottom of the stair. Middle row of shelves. To have a chance of combating the enemies, you will need numbers 3 and 4. Take them._

 _I think the creatures will still be confined to the town and its environs by Gravity Falls's weirdness barrier, so the initial urgency is to get the populace out of harm's way. It's up to you to evacuate the Valley. Get as many out as you possibly can. Fiddleford McGucket will help. I've been in touch with him, and if necessary, coordinate with him, but first do these things on your own:_

 _Call the number at the end of this text and ask to speak to Deputy Director Powers. Tell him this is a directive from SFP-1: Code DR, Action TEV. He will understand and will take it from there. See that the Ramirezes and your family are safe. Then call the number for Fiddleford, the second one at the end of the text, and you two decide how to approach the emergency._

 _Only with Deputy Director's and Fiddleford's help and only after you have followed these steps can you hope to banish Bill's henchmaniacs._

 _You may not see us again._

 _May God help you._

 _Stanford Pines_

* * *

"Oh, my gracious!" Gideon said. He hurriedly dressed and ran downstairs, taking them two at a time. "Mama, Daddy," he yelled, "I gotta go—somethin' real important's come up. Y'all do me a big old favor and run and get Ulva and her mama and—and take 'em out to the Dalles for today, hear? Tell 'em it's a surprise shoppin' trip or something!"

"Gideon," his mother began.

"There ain't time for questions! Just go, please!"

"All right, darlin'," Bud Gleeful said from where he sat at the breakfast table.

Then, sounding like his old hateful self, Gideon yelled, "Get up, y'all! Do it _now_!"

Gideon heard his dad say, "Let's go, Mama."

"Thank you both kindly!" Gideon yelled. "I'll call y'all later today!"

And he ran out to the garage and jumped into the shiny, top-condition car that was waiting for his sixteenth birthday—he was still too young to drive it legally. Regardless of age or anything, he started it and roared off toward the Shack.

* * *

In the clearing, they lost track of how many monstrosities they had disintegrated. At least twenty, only one that Dipper clearly recognized from before—Teeth, who'd once, together with 8-Ball, pursued Dipper with the intent of eating him. He looked like a giant version of those toy clacking wind-up teeth, and he sounded like the comedian who sat in the center square of that old-timey TV quiz show that Grunkle Stan sometimes watched in reruns.

Now he wasn't laughing any more. Mabel had yelled, "Die, evil dentures, die!" and for the first time in many tries, she scored a direct hit that fragmented the creature. The bits and pieces spun back into the red rip in the effigy's eye like what goes into a toilet spiraling down the drain. Mabel blew on the barrel of the quantum destabilizer pistol. "Hey! Guys, I finally got one!"

"Don't get cocky, kid!" Ford roared as he blasted a smaller creature, a dinner-plate-sized spider with a fanged mouth on the tip of every hairy leg. It ghosted away in filthy-looking streamers of smoke, sucked back into the Nightmare Realm. Some scrabbling tentacles and claws retreated back through the opening. Then, at least for a few moments, calm returned.

The things came intermittently, in waves. So far the defenders had eradicated all that had come within range, but it seemed that when an invasion began, every time they shot one down, two more emerged from the growing red split in reality.

"Quiet again," Ford said. "They're regrouping."

"Ya mean we gotta kill the same ones again?" Stan roared.

"No, no, the ones we've hit are dead. A great many are left, and they're possibly trying to plan a new form of attack. Stay sharp, everyone!"

"Ford," Stan bellowed in exasperation, "ya gotta blow the whole thing up!"

"That is extraordinarily dangerous!" Ford said. "If I disintegrate the effigy, it may implode into the Nightmare Realm, leaving a jagged and growing hole in reality! That could conceivably drag in the moonstones, or even one of them, and then our containment field would fail and the creatures would all spill out again."

"Yeah, but they're eventually gonna fill up that damn purple bubble an' just shove it out until they bust in anyhow!"

The two older Pines Twins stood facing each other. Stan had found his fedora—soaking wet, but he'd clapped it back on anyway. The sun was up, the clouds overhead now sailed past in broken formation, and the temperature had dropped back down to the sixties, promising a much cooler day.

It would have been beautiful if the end of the world hadn't been threatening again.

"Ford," Stan said, "look, we can play defense until we fall over from exhaustion. Sooner or later, we gotta go on the offense."

Mabel thrust a hand into the air. "And nobody can be more offensive than our Grunkle Stan!"

"Thanks, Pumpkin!" Stan said, grinning. "How's about, it, Sixer? Wait for 'em to wear us down, or blow 'em to hell?" He glanced at Wendy. "Don't tell Sheila I said hell, OK?"

"I could try it," Ford said, sounding unconvinced and unwilling. "Kids! You three return to the Shack and if the Ramirezes are still there, you take them out of the Valley—all the way out—and leave Stan and me behind to try this!"

"Not on your life, Ford!" Wendy said.

"We're not leaving you!" Mabel yelled at the same time. "Never!"

"We just need a plan!" Dipper yelled.

Despite his scowl, Stan laughed. "You knuckleheads! You're all jerks and disobedient losers, and I love you! OK, we got two Pines Brainiacs. We'll let them try to come up with—"

"Heads up! Here come some more," Ford interrupted, raising his rifle.

* * *

Gideon came running up the stairs from the laboratory, clutching Journals 3 and 4 to his chest. "Everybody ready?" he asked.

The Ramirezes were in the gift shop, Abuelita holding Harmony, who was wailing, and trying to shush her. Melody, looking scared and solemn, held Little Soos's hand.

"Dude, I really hate to do this," Soos said to Gideon. "But Dr. Pines texted and specifically asked me to get my family clear. Tell you what, I'll drive the pickup and Abuelita and you can ride with me. Melody will take the kids in the Jeep. Gideon, dawg, what about Mabel's pigs? Take 'em, yea or nay?"

"Sorry, Soos. Can't worry about them," Gideon said, shaking his head. "Time may be too short!"

"Well—at least they can, like, hide in the Shack. I know the unicorn barrier still works. I just hope they don't mess up the floor too bad! You go help Abuelita get in the truck, and I'll go herd Widdles and Waddles into the Shack. Melody, you take good care of the kids. Let's rendezvous at Dr. P's new school. That's, like, twenty miles from the valley, so it should be safe."

Soos hurried back of the Shack—for his size he could run when he needed to—and Waddles and Widdles obligingly followed him up the steps to the Museum entrance. "You two pig dawgs behave yourselves, now!" he said. "There's a nice patch of sun in the gift shop in the mornings that you can, like, lay in, and there's a box of tissues on the counter there if you get hungry or some junk. In you go—whoa! No, wait, stop!"

Too late. Tripper had dashed out the second Soos opened the door, and the dog flashed across the lawn and down the Mystery Trail, running all-out with no trace of limp or weakness. Shaking his head, Soos got the pigs safely inside and closed and locked the door. Then he hurried to the truck and climbed into the driver's seat. "I just Soosed up bad," he groaned. "I accidentally let Hambone's and Dipper's dog get loose."

"Let's go," Gideon said. "Too late to do anything now. He'll find 'em and probably be OK. Hey, in town we got one stop to make. No, two, but close together. I gotta tell the Sheriff to evacuate the town, and I gotta tell Shaundra Jimenez to broadcast a warnin' to get out in case Blubs won't do it. Go!" He took out his phone and started to punch in the number for Deputy Director Powers.

"Aw, man," Soos lamented as he put the truck in gear. "I hope the little dog dude's gonna be all right."


	14. Chapter 14

**Dog Days**

 **(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)**

* * *

 **14: Breakthrough**

"Think they gave up?" Stan panted. He wiped his face with a handkerchief, even though the morning was relatively cool. They'd had to hustle there for a while.

"I doubt it," Ford said grimly. "That would be uncharacteristic of transdimensional creatures. In my experience, they are relentless and determined."

"Yeah, because they're stupid," Stan grumped. He walked all the way around the effigy. "Nothin' shakin' right now, anyhow."

The six of them had just beaten back a frantic onslaught—mostly smaller creatures pouring out of the rift, zooming around inside the containment bubble like hyperactive fish, evidently trying what Stan had feared, filling up the weirdness bubble around the effigy until the pressure of all those bodies pushed it off the moonstones and deactivated it.

Team Pines had fired into the melee and had disintegrated at least six creatures—it was extremely hard to be sure or to keep count—before the rest retreated. Now they found the waiting tense and almost unbearable.

"Relentless, my foot," Stan muttered. "I think maybe they gave up."

"Unlikely!" Ford said. "On the other side of that rift, they're probably just regrouping and forming a new strategy! But we have a problem. Our energy packs are depleting. Mine's down to less than twenty percent. I'm sure the pistols need recharging, too. Who'll go back to the Shack for something I should have brought but didn't think of?"

"Uh, how heavy is it?" Mabel asked. She had experimentally pointed her quantum destabilizer at the sky and had pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

"About fourteen kilos. And it's small—"

"Whoa, whoa, you lost me there," Mabel said, waving her free hand. "How heavy is fourteen kilos in real weight?"

"Not quite thirty-one pounds," Ford and Dipper said in unison—though to be absolutely correct, Ford had said, "Not quite," and Dipper had started, "It's about."

"Ha!" Mabel said. "Jinx! You owe me two sodas! I dunno, I'd go for it, but that's pretty heavy—"

"I'll go," Dipper said. "I can bring it pretty close in the golf cart, then carry it the rest of the way. Uh—wait, Grunkle Ford, what is it?"

"The Zeepee-Eesocue," Ford said.

"Uh-huh," Dipper said. "And what is that, exactly?"

"Mason!" Ford said, sounding exasperated. "It's simple! It's the Zero Point Energy Source Outlet Cube! Z-P-E-S-O-Cube. I abbreviated the 'cube' for convenience. You know, you've seen them in my lab. One's about yay by yay, electrical outlets in five of the six faces. It has eight regular outlets, six 220-volt outlets, one on the top marked DO NOT USE? Remember? I know there's at least one under my workbench, a cube as I said, metal, sort of black and white and silvery."

"I'm on it!" Dipper said, already running.

But Ford shouted, "Stop! Give your destabilizer to Wendy. It'll be better than her axe, unless one gets loose!"

"Wendy?" Mabel asked. "What about Mabel? Aw, man!"

Dipper skidded to a halt and gave the pistol to Wendy, who gave him a quick peck of a kiss. "For luck!" she said. Dipper nodded and ran.

He normally was a sprinter, not a distance runner, but he could do a mile in a pinch, and the pinch seemed to be on Running full-tilt toward the Shack he saw—yes, it was definitely Tripper—running toward him. Dipper stumbled to a stop. "How did you get out? Come with me, boy!"

But Tripper seemed to suspect that Dipper meant to take him back to the Shack, and he circled widely, looking doggily apologetic, and then sped on down the trail. Dipper hesitated, but only for a moment. The dog couldn't do any harm, and Ford needed the energy cube. He finished the run in a respectable six minutes and some seconds, unlocked the gift shop door, ran in, yelled "Anybody home?" to no answer. So he opened the concealed stairway and hurried down to the second lab table. Sure enough, three of the energy cubes—probably reserves in case one of the cubes Ford used to power all his lab instruments and equipment went blooey—sat piled in a stack.

Dipper had to kneel down to reach them and found that thirty pounds can feel quite heavy, especially if you're on your knees and are leaning forward. But he wrested the top cube out, got a better grip on it, and remembered a time when Soos had warned him, "Be safe, now! Lift with your knees, dawg!"

Of course, on that occasion Stan, who was supervising some repairs involving concrete pavers, had snorted. "What kind of cockamamie talk is that? Don't listen to Soos. Nobody can grip with their knees! Use your hands, Dipper, your hands!"

Ugh, it was heavy. Clutching the cube, Dipper waddled over to the elevator, elbowed the button to ride up to the top level, and then humped the cube up the stairs, going up about six or eight steps, resting it briefly on a higher step, then heaving it up and repeating the process. He grabbed the golf-cart key from behind the checkout counter, carried it by clenching the fob between his teeth, and went out onto the porch. There he set the cube down, locked up the Shack again, and ran across the lawn to fire up the golf cart.

He puttered it around, retrieved the cube, and sat it on the floor in the passenger position. Then he headed down the trail.

Just past the bonfire glade, he saw a Gnome flagging him down. He slowed and the Gnome asked him something in garbled English. Dipper got only the gist: "What's going on?"

"Tell the others that Bill Cipher's henchmaniacs are trying to come through at the stone statue! Get everybody to safety!" Dipper called back.

The Gnome scuttled, and Dipper floored the accelerator, zooming back down the trail at a breathtaking fourteen miles per hour.

At that speed, it took him about five minutes to get to the turn-off for the effigy. He steered into the woods for fifty yards or so until the underbrush defeated him, and he jumped out and grabbed the cube. He had to lug it about the length of a football field plus a baseball diamond, but he made it back, and nothing seemed to have changed much—except Mabel was on her knees, hugging Tripper. "He must've got away from Soos," Dipper panted. "Looks like the Ramirezes got away, though—Jeep and pickup truck are gone."

Ford took the cube and plugged his destabilizer in. It charged in about ten seconds, the power strip changing from an ominous orange to a brilliant green. "Now yours, Wendy, and yours, Mabel."

Dipper collected the two pistols, and they charged as rapidly as the rifle had. "Stanley, yours."

Stan handed his over. Ford had just plugged in its charging cord when Wendy yelled, "Guys! Quick! Something's happening!"

* * *

Mom's hand felt cool on his forehead. She smiled, though she looked anxious, and shook her head. "Mm, well, you do feel a little bit warm to me, but I guess my hands must be cold. The thermometer says you don't have a fever." She tried it again and then shrugged. "Ninety-eight point six. But you look like you feel bad. Is your throat sore, baby?"

Billy Sheaffer shook his head. "I'm just real, real sleepy," he murmured. He felt, well, not weak exactly, but not inclined to move.

He didn't know the word _lassitude_ , but that's the one his dad had used that morning before leaving for the college: "Honey, look after Billy. He's got a strange lassitude this morning. Let him rest and call me if he feels really sick."

Now, sitting on the foot of Billy's bed, his mother smiled in a concerned kind of way. "Did you have bad dreams all night?"

He frowned, thinking back. "Um, no, not so much. No, I don't think I did. Just—I don't know. I couldn't make myself go to sleep, is all."

Mom glanced at the tray beside his bed. "Well, you ate all your cereal and banana. How's the tummy? Hurts? Do you feel nauseated?"

He rolled his head from side to side on the pillow. "No. Just sleepy," he insisted.

"Anything you want?"

"To sleep."

His mother chuckled. "I'm sorry to pester you, Billy. I just don't want my boy to be sick without my doing something about it. OK, no symptoms except sleepy. What would you like? For me and the girls just to leave you alone and keep the house quiet while you try to catch up?"

Billy nodded. "That would be great. I just—I just need to sleep."

"All right, baby. It's seven now. I'll go on downstairs and do some housework, and I'll send the girls over to Crissandra's for the morning. Her mom said they'd be welcome. I'll keep everything as quiet as I can for you. I'll peek in every three hours or so to make sure you don't need anything. Or, better, if you do want something, I'll bring you Grandma's bell to ring. How's that?"

"That's fine," Billy said.

She took the tray, went out, and in three or four minutes returned with a handbell, a pretty big one. Years and years before, Mrs. Sheaffer's great-grandmother—they thought, at least, maybe it was her great-great grandmother, even—had started a one-room school for poor children. She had been the organizer, the backer, the principal, and the only teacher, and the handbell had been her way of calling the pupils in at the beginning of the day. The bell and her story had remained in the family all these years. Now it was a treasured heirloom.

Mom set it down on his bedside table. "Now, if you feel sick or if you want anything—anything at all—you just pick that bell up and ring it as hard as you want to, and I'll be right here." She leaned down and kissed his forehead.

She started out, but he stopped her at the door: "Mom? I'll be fine. Thanks. And, uh, I love you."

"I love you, too, baby," she said.

And then, softly, she closed the door.

Billy lay back on his pillow and started to take deep breaths. He thought, _Am I doing this right?_

And in his head he heard a voice, kind of high-pitched: _Yeah, kid. Just let every muscle relax. Feel like you're floating. Hey, I'm sorry about this. It's way too soon, really, but this is important. Trust me, OK? Just let yourself go. When you go to sleep, you're gonna have one really wild dream, but it's OK. Remember, it's just a dream. You'll know it's just a dream. Go on, you're doing it, relax, relax. Just go to sleep and let me take over._

Billy couldn't visualize the voice in his mind, of course, but he had the strangest feeling that he knew who it was. Someone—his consciousness flickered as he slipped closer to the edge of sleep—someone from long ago.

 _You're doing great, kid. Little bit more, just turn loose, and then I can take over. Is it a deal?_

"Deal," Billy murmured, and then he was asleep.

* * *

A tentacle, dark purple and gelatinous-looking, had sprouted just outside the weirdness barrier, growing from the earth, or so it appeared.

"One's tunneled under!" Ford said.

"I got it!" Wendy swung her axe back.

"No!" Mabel yelled. Tripper, growling, had squirmed from her grip and now he rushed to seize the tentacle in his jaws.

The tip of it suddenly grew a wicked curved stinger, and it darted down, striking the dog in the side.

Tripper jerked as though hit by electricity, but with a snarl, he shook his head, ripping the tentacle open, and then he staggered back.

Wendy's axe severed the thing right at ground level. It thrashed for a couple of seconds and then began to liquefy, and the stump jerked back beneath the ground.

"Look out! They're pourin' outa the eye!" Stan yelled.

It was like an explosion. The larger creatures came rushing out. Dipper glimpsed Pyronica and Hectorgon, among others. He fired, wounding the Amorphous Shape, and Ford blew Hectorgon to atoms—but more were coming, and the containment field began to flicker—

"We're losin' it, Poindexter!" Stan yelled. "Kids, run! We'll hold 'em back!"

"Not a chance!" Wendy yelled.

Dipper said, "Mabel, you ought—"

He broke off.

Mabel knelt, her head down, holding the limp form of Tripper.

When she looked up, her face was like the mask of tragedy.


	15. Chapter 15

**Dog Days**

 **(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)**

* * *

 **15: Ex Machina**

"He's still breathing!" Mabel said. Tripper's ribs heaved as he gasped, his mouth gaping, his tongue licking his lips, the air wheezing in and out of his lungs. Just to the right of his spine, high on his side, a bloody wound showed, dark red already clotting on the pale brown fur.

"Take care of her!" Wendy yelled to Dipper. "Gimme your guns!"

Dipper handed over both destabilizer pistols. Wendy whirled, arched her back, and with a pistol in each hand began to fire at the mob of monsters swarming inside the containment globe. She was new to this, and out of six shots, only one connected, but it obliterated the thing with eighty-odd faces.

Her aim improved. When the purple globby thing tried to burrow out again, Wendy ran to the spot, aimed nearly straight down at point-blank range, zapped it four times, and it exploded into oily, streaking purple vapor. Nothing else tried the underground route.

Dipper thought, _We can't hold them off long._ And clearly, what Ford was leading amounted only to a desperate holding action. The humans were terribly outnumbered, and unless a destabilizer ray hit a monster directly in some vital area, it reassembled itself and came back to the attack. The containment field buzzed and energies snapped along its surface as its strength was tested by the monstrosities desperately trying to get to the Pineses and Wendy.

The defenders realized the same thing. "They're gainin' on us!" Stan yelled.

"Keep firing, Stanley!" Ford replied. "Kids, you and the dog get back! Get out of our line of fire!"

Dipper picked up Tripper, who whimpered, and he and Mabel, stooping forward, retreated to behind Ford. Stanford stood facing the effigy head-on; if he'd stationed himself at twelve o'clock, Wendy was off to his left at two, Stan to his right at ten.

"They're bunchin' up behind the statue!" Stan said. "I'm gonna go partway to the back. Don't shoot me!"

Ford nodded and yelled, "Wendy! You, too, but just get where you can cover both front and back, and both of you stay aware of the other! The destabilizer's just as deadly against us as against interdimensional beings! Be careful!"

So Wendy moved to nearly three o'clock on the imaginary time piece, Stan to nine. They kept up a steady fire, and for a moment the move seemed to make a difference: some of the monsters, evidently frightened at being shot at from the new angles, retreated. But more poured out to take their places.

The battle might have gone either way. For long seconds the forces seemed roughly balanced—though the containment field was still slowly filling, Ford, Stan, and Wendy were shooting down the foes nearly as fast as they appeared.

But among the monsters, the big guns were starting to show. Keyhole became briefly visible, and 8-Ball, though they managed to evade the destabilizer beams and ducked back through the rift when the firing got heavy again.

Ford said between clenched teeth, "At this rate of fire, we'll exhaust the energy supply in just a few minutes. I'm gonna recharge the rifle now. Then you, Stan, do your pistol. Then give it to Wendy—she's a better shot, anyway—and take one of hers to charge, then give that one back and recharge the last one. And don't argue!"

"Sounds like a plan to me!" a sweating Stan yelled. "Do it, Sixer!"

Dipper felt torn between comforting Mabel and the suffering dog and returning to the counterattack. He didn't think Tripper would make it—he had the look of death on him, foam at the mouth, rolling eyes, jerking legs, obviously starved for oxygen. But how could he tell Mabel that?

He put his hand on her back and felt her sobs as she cradled the groaning dog, murmuring to him wordlessly. Tripper tried to lick her hand, and his tail thumped weakly, even then.

"Hey, Mabel," came a taunting female voice from the energy field. "We killed your dog!"

It was Pyronica, who was proving the hardest target. She was fast, she was tricky, and she dodged as if some instinct took her out of range of a ray nanoseconds before it arrived. Laughing like a deranged thing, the flaming female monster swooped back, hiding in the crowd of monsters, and none of the shooters got a chance even to aim at her.

Wordlessly, Mabel jumped up and ran for the effigy. Dipper didn't even realize for a moment what had happened, and then cold fear clutched him. "No, Mabel!"

"Where are you?" Mabel screamed, running around the perimeter. "Show yourself, you flaming _bitch_!"

"Stop firing! Cease fire! You'll hit Mabel!" Ford shouted.

Mabel ran all the way around the pulsating field, and when Pyronica swooped past again, Mabel tried to punch her out. Her fist went through the field—

And Pyronica seized it. "Got her!" she screamed.

Stan dived forward and hooked his arm around Mabel's waist. "Not on my watch!" he yelled, hauling her back from the crackling, fizzing energy field.

He pulled Mabel back, but she dragged Pyronica with her. The interdimensional creature's gloved arm, its clawed hand seized to Mabel's wrist, sizzled through the barrier but did not let go.

"She _wants_ you to pull her out!" Dipper yelled. "Wendy, get your gun and—"

Tripper jerked and, with a strength Dipper could not believe he sill had, rolled to his feet and ran to Mabel and launched himself. With his last strength, he locked his jaws on Pyronica's wrist and chomped down hard.

Pyronica shrieked and let go of Mabel. Tripper fell to the grass as Mabel tumbled backward. Only Pyronica's fingers were still through the field, trying to rip it open.

Mabel and Tripper rolled over the grass, and Stan snatched them both up.

"Oh, no!" Ford said. "The field—it's fading!"

Fading, nothing. Like a soap bubble pierced by a pin, the containment field vanished.

And Bill's minions screamed in triumph as they exploded into the reality of Gravity Falls.

* * *

Dipper covered Mabel with his body. She was moaning, "It hurts, Dipper!"

Beside her, Tripper did not appear to be breathing. The fur around his mouth had been frizzled away as though by heat.

One of the creatures, he didn't know which, struck him from behind, a hard blow to the back of his head that knocked his cap off and exploded inside his head in a yellow flash of pain.

Then everything turned purple for a moment, and then it all looked hazy and the sounds came from far away.

But he heard a familiar voice from inside himself: Bill's.

"Hang on, kid! The cavalry's on the way! I hope the Sheaffer kid lives through this!"

"Help Mabel," Dipper mumbled, fighting not to pass out.

* * *

Long after it was all over, Dipper was not really sure if he had hallucinated a lot of what happened next.

He heard the terrifying laugh—"Ah-hah-hah-hah-hah! It's show time! Hiya, guys and gals. NOW COOL IT!"

Bill Cipher, man-sized, floated ten feet above Wendy, Stan, and Ford, who had hunkered down for a last stand.

The swarm of monsters froze in mid-air or mid-stride, gaping at Bill.

Then they cheered like, well, maniacs.

"You're back!" screeched Pyronica.

"Yeah, I'm back, baby!" Bill said, twirling his cane. "And by the way, I've changed my plans. Hey, 8-Ball, you're lookin' good."

"Thank you?" rasped the monster with billiard balls for eyes.

"Yeah, only I don't think I want to see you anymore, though," Bill said, and he snapped his fingers.

The monster 8-Ball fell apart. Crumbled into an organic mess. Bill aimed his finger. "Pyronica, honey, you're next. Unless you and all the other henchmaniacs are ready to make a dee-al!"

"You wouldn't!" Pyronica yelled.

"Let's clean this up." He shot another bolt, and the metal cage around the Cipher effigy vanished. The golden patina disappeared, too, and the half-rebuilt arm suddenly was whole, except it was all made of ordinary stone, not of gold or gold-plated stone. "And in a minute I'll zip up that nasty rift. And you guys, you gotta go. Hard feelings all around, whattaya say?"

"Why are you _doing_ this?" Pyronica screamed, clenching her fists.

"'Cause I've come to the rescue! I'm a me-us ex machina! Listen, seriously, I've turned over a leaf, guys. It's been fun playing with you, but play time's over. Now you're going back to your own dimensions."

"You can't _do_ that!" yelped Pacifier.

"Watch me, Ace. Your choice, guys. Your own dimensions or the Nightmare Realm. I'll give you to three to decide. One—two—" he snapped his fingers. "Just kidding. To your own dimensions!"

They popped out of existence, all at the same time.

Immediately, Bill settled to the ground, drooping. He leaned on his cane, visibly trembling. "Man, I m getting too human for this crap." He snapped his fingers again. "There, the rift is gone now. Sixer, you OK?"

"Bill Cipher," Ford said, aiming his destabilizer. "I don't know how you survived, but I've got you covered!"

"Nah, nah, I'm not really here," Bill said, and indeed he was flickering. "This is just a manifestation. Like in the Mindscape, no physical form. Sixer, come on, don't taze me, bro, I'm existing off the energy of a little boy six hundred miles away! Keep me here another five minutes, he'll never wake up! I'm really trying to do you a favor here—"

"Bill!" Mabel wailed. "Help him." She held up Tripper. The dog was no longer breathing.

Bill did that thing of turning himself inside-out so he was facing her. For Cipher, his voice became strangely soft: "Aw, Shooting Star! I'm sorry, kid, I really am. I think he's gone."

Dipper put his arm around his sister and rested his other hand on the dog's limp head. "Bill! Come on, man. One time you saved my life when _I_ was gone. Please. I know you can do it."

The point of the triangle drooped and—did the one eye gleam with an unshed tear? Nah, probably not, this is Bill Cipher here. "Pine Tree, kid—don't ask for that, please. I _want_ to do the right thing, but trying to do this means putting my final chance at risk—"

"Don't _want_ to do it," Wendy said from behind him, aiming both her pistols. "Just _do_ it."

"Oh, crap," Bill said. He sighed. "Red, you're one tough gal. If I'd had you on my side—oh, well. Stand back, everybody but Shooting Star and Pine Tree. I don't know if I got enough left for this. Gonna have to draw a little on both of you kids for energy, and it may sting. I only hope Billy can hold on for another two minutes."

He took a deep breath and closed his eye.


	16. Chapter 16

**Dog Days**

 **(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)**

* * *

 **16: Goodbyes and Greetings**

With a clarity he'd never experienced, Tripper knew this: it is a bitter feeling to have much to say and no time left in which to say it, much love and no way left to show it.

He felt an unendurable compulsion to leave. To depart.

He stood looking on at Dipper and Mabel and . . . his old form. Oh, he wanted to lick Mabel's face, to tell her it was all right, that he would gladly do it all over again. And Dipper looked so miserable, crying there right in front of everyone. And his own poor body looked so shrunken, all torn and burned.

Still he hesitated, whining an inaudible doggy moan of misery and regret and the agony of separation.

 _Time to go._

It wasn't a voice, yet it came from behind him like a voice, warm and accepting and gentle.

Still he lingered, pleading in his mind: No, not yet. Let me try to fix them in my mind and hold them in my heart and remember them forever.

Oh, he knew that if he turned away, ahead of him he would see a lovely, welcoming light, inviting him to run toward it, and he knew he _could_ run at top speed, the wind in his ears, and feel no pain, and all the regrets and all the memories of earth would drop away from him, leaving him light as air.

And he would run to the dark, dread, bottomless gorge between Now and Forever and find the colorful bridge arching over it, and he could run _up_ the bridge and then prance _down_ the far side, whole and healed, and pass into—into—

Whatever waited. He didn't know. In fact, no one could tell him exactly what waited, except that it would be wonderful.

But still his spirit yearned to remain with the twins.

Oh, Voice, don't make me forget them, or if I have to forget them, then don't make me go.

Please, Voice.

I don't ask for much.

Just a little while.

Please let me stay.

Please.

Just a little while.

* * *

Now, dogs are more level-headed than most people think, or for that matter, than most people are. A dog can't be hypnotized, and it is damn hard to fool a dog. Oh, put on a Halloween mask and jump out of a closet yelling at your buddy, if you're that kind of jerk, and he will yelp in alarm and maybe flee, but after that one startled instant, he will know who's behind the false face. He may even forgive you.

Also, as a rule, dogs do not hallucinate. Grandma's dog used to gently pull her back into her chair when Grandma started to get up and go see what Grandpa (three years dead) wanted, for she was certain she had just heard him calling her from the next room. And Grandma would arthritically bend over and pet her dog and say, "He's gone, Betsey. Good girl. I know that. I just forget sometimes."

Dogs, in the core of their souls, are realists.

 _Souls? Dogs? Really?_

Hey, look in the eyes of a dog that loves you, even if you don't deserve that love.

You'll see a soul there.

But dogs, now, dogs see what is before them, not visions. A dog is a realist.

So Tripper could _not_ see a triangular yellow someone kneeling near the twins. Bill Cipher was, after all, an apparition who existed in their minds and memories. He wasn't there. Oh, sure, he was there, all right, but he wasn't _there_ there, if you can understand that.

Anyway, Tripper could not see him. His eyes could not capture an image that existed in the minds of the people in the clearing. Tripper could not hear him, either, for Bill's voice came not to the humans' ears but to their understanding. He could not smell him, because a mental image has no scent. For Tripper, he did not exist.

Or . . . maybe he did. Maybe in some strange, arcane way that neither dog nor person could explain, just maybe he did.

Oh, the pull of that beautiful light behind him, so strong, so irresistible: _Time to go. Here, boy. Good dog. Come._

Whining, Tripper backed away, tucking his ghostly tail between his invisible legs.

No, no, Voice, don't make me go.

And then . . .

Well, Dipper and Mabel saw Bill Cipher hold out his ridiculous stick-figure hand, clenched around something. He opened his fingers, and a tiny but brilliantly gleaming white spark floated out.

"Gotta go," Cipher sighed, and he vanished.

The kids could see the spark.

And, wonder of wonders, Tripper could see the spark.

Behind him shone the glorious, infinite light of Eternity.

Before him gleamed the tiny spark of a dog's life, a dozen years or fifteen or even as much as eighteen, maybe. With a lot of luck.

The light behind him called.

But instead of turning toward it, he inched forward. He saw the spark sink into his lifeless body, cradled there in Mabel's arms, stroked by Dipper's hand as the boy shook with sobs.

Don't cry. I won't leave you.

Tripper leaped, following the spark.

He sank into his damaged body, into hurt and trouble and sorrow—

But also into love.

And he opened his eyes and drew in a deep breath.

And squirmed around to lick both their faces.


	17. Chapter 17

**Dog Days**

 **(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)**

* * *

 **17: Mopping Up**

With all his weapons re-charged, Ford kept watch at the effigy while Stan and Wendy took the twins and Tripper back to the Shack—Wendy driving them in the golf cart, Stan hustling along behind. Dipper and Mabel were groggy and unfocused, Tripper alive but in distress, gasping and wheezing, his eyelids swelling.

Wendy got them into the Green Machine just as Stan came panting up. "Called ahead," he gasped, waving his phone. "Blubs kept people from comin' _into_ the valley, didn't evacuate. Doc Setter is in. First him, then the clinic." He climbed into the back seat with Mabel and Tripper. "Gun it!"

At the vet's, Stan yelled until Setter's receptionist came out and pointed them to the barn. "He's in there!"

Stan lugged Tripper in. Dipper staggered along behind him. Doc Setter was just coming out of a stall, wiping his hands on a towel. "What's wrong?"

"Sick dog!" Stan said. "Got stung. Here, help him!"

"Epin—ep—adrenaline!" Dipper gasped. "Help his breathing."

"I think you're right," the doctor said. "Bring him into the examining room in the house and I'll take care of him."

Stan said, "Dip, you go with Wendy to the clinic. I'll stay with the dog." He clenched his teeth. "And, uh. And. And I'll-pay-the-bill!"

Wendy had to help Dipper walk straight. "Dude, how'd you know that about the adrenaline?"

"Didn't," Dipper said. "Bill tipped me off, I think. Inside me. Told me. Whoa, I think I'm gonna—" he slumped, unconscious.

Wendy tore up the street racing to the clinic. By then Dipper had come around and could more or less walk, but Wendy carried Mabel inside. "Hey, doc!" she yelled as she banged through the front door. "Got a couple emergencies!"

Dr. La Fievre and his nurse Yvonne hurried both twins into an examining room. He checked their pulse rates, blood pressure, pupil responses, and then looked into their mouths. "Huh," he said. "This hit suddenly?

"Yeah," Wendy said, worriedly. "Like all at once, _boosh_. One of those Gravity Falls things."

The young doctor nodded. He'd been in Gravity Falls long enough to learn about some of the unique maladies of the little town that reality forgot. "They both have a degree of anemia," he said. "Look." He pressed Mabel's thumbnail. "See how pale the nail bed is? I know this isn't chronic. I want a CBC. They're both O positive. I think we'll try a blood transfusion initially. That should resolve the symptoms temporarily. I don't see any obvious markers of internal hemorrhage—"

"It's not that," Wendy said. "Like I said—something paranormal. Something Gravity Falls."

The doctor nodded. "Well, it's serious, but not grave. Let me get them prepped, get them on oxygen, and then we'll go on from there. Please wait in the waiting room. I'll let you know something soon as possible."

"Don't keep me hanging," Wendy warned him.

"No, of course not."

While she fretted, Wendy got a call from Soos—he and the family had just returned to the valley, summoned back by Ford. "We're gonna delay opening until sometime this afternoon," he said. "Those government guys in the black suits? About six of 'em are gonna be there, using the Shack as a temporary command post, I guess? Anyway, you'll see them, so don't like freak out when you come back. Dipper and Mabel OK?"

"I think they will be," Wendy said cautiously. "Doctor's checking them out right now."

Soos hesitated and then said, "Uh, the dog kinda got away from me. My bad. Any sign of him?"

"Oh, yeah, he came and found us and got a little hurt. The vet's working on him," Wendy said.

She heard Soos groan faintly. Then, in a guilty-sounding voice, he added, "I hope he'll be, like, all right."

Half an hour later, a pale Teek showed up in the waiting room. "Where's Mabel?"

"Doctor's with her right now," Wendy said.

He settled onto one of the waiting-room chairs. "What happened?"

"Oh, man," Wendy said. "It's hard to believe." But she told Teek as much as she thought he needed to know, and just before she wound up the story, the doctor came in.

"They'll be all right," he said. "Really strange. No sign of hemorrhage or organic cause. It's sort of like they made a blood donation and overdid it. They've perked back up. I'm going to give them a couple of prescriptions, just in case, and I want them to get plenty of bed rest for the next forty-eight hours. Have them check in with me again on Friday morning, just to be sure nothing weird's going on."

Teek jumped up. "Can I see her? Them, I mean?"

"They're getting dressed," the doctor said. "They'll be out in a minute. Remember, bed rest and get those prescriptions filled. Have them drink lots of fluids. I'm giving them each an iron supplement, but they won't need to take that for more than a week if their levels begin to come back up. Oh, and pick up a diet list for anemia patients. Yvonne will have one."

"Gotcha," Wendy said.

"Get the prescriptions from Yvonne," the doctor said. "Tell Stanford I'll send a bill."

"Teek?" The door opened, and Mabel, still looking weak, emerged and jumped Teek. "You came to see me!"

"Well, yeah!" Teek said as she kissed his face.

Dipper emerged and puffed out his cheeks. "That was _not_ fun," he told Wendy.

Wendy, looking much more herself, said, "Teek, you drive Mabes over to the Shack. Dip and I will follow up on their dog," Wendy said. "You feel up to that, Dipper?"

Dipper nodded. "I got a pint of blood," he said in a voice shaky with wonder. His color was much better, and his gait was steady, but he put one bandaged arm around Wendy's waist and sort of leaned on her.

"Hey, Dip," Mabel called from where Teek had just opened the passenger door of his car for her, "You phone me as soon as—as soon."

"Sure, Sis," Dipper said.

In the Dodge Dart, he fumbled with the seat belt. "Feel kind of out of it," he mumbled. "Are you OK?"

"Yeah, fine," Wendy said. She clicked his belt for him and then started the engine. "I hate to say it, but Bill Cipher saved our butts back there. What flipped him, man?"

"I think the Axolotl did," Dipper said. "Uh, Wendy? I don't think we'll ever see Bill Cipher as the triangle guy again. I think from now on—he's only going to be human. Billy Sheaffer. Oh, God, I ought to—" He pulled out his phone and dialed.

In a few seconds, he said, "Mrs. Sheaffer? This is Dipper Pines, from down the street, you know—yeah, hi. Listen, I talked to Billy recently and he seemed a little sick. How is—oh, he is? Well, yeah, if he feels like it. OK."

He said to Wendy, "She says he's awake and just had something to eat. She's taking the phone up to him."

* * *

"Dipper?"

"Hey, Billy. How's it going?"

"Uh. I guess OK?" Then Billy lowered his voice: "Dipper—was I really with you? Did I really fight monsters and help with your dog? Mom says I was dreaming, but it seemed so real. And I feel so—like I'm two people. Or was. Am I crazy?"

"No," Dipper said. "You're not crazy. Look, Billy, I'm going to tell you some things when Mabel and I get back to Piedmont, OK? And they're gonna sound really weird, but you can handle it, man. So hang in there until our birthdays."

After a long, reluctant pause, Billy said, "OK."

It was a very strange coincidence, but his eleventh birthday and their seventeenth birthdays fell on the same date—August 31.

Before he hung up, Dipper said, "Billy—hang on to this, now: you did good, man. I don't mean you did well. I'm saying you really did good."

"Thanks, Dipper."

* * *

At the vet's, Stan brought Tripper out to the car, still carrying him. "He's gonna be OK," he said. "He's gotta wear this lampshade thing around his head. The doc stitched up that sting. He said it musta been one hell of a wasp, don't tell Sheila I said hell, and I told him it was a Gravity Falls hornet. He's got an ointment for where his mouth got burned and some pills to take, but he's gonna be OK."

Dipper had turned around in the front seat. Tripper was on the back seat beside Stan, looking reasonably whole, though he did wear the collar of shame and had a shaved patch on his side and a small wound with three or four stitches in it.

"We're going to see Mabel," Dipper told Tripper. "Will you be happy to see her?"

Tripper raised his right paw and—Dipper could have sworn—winked at him.

Dipper smiled back and made the call that Mabel had requested.

* * *

"Agent Trigger is in charge of the mop-up squad," Ford told them in the Shack parlor. "But the readings are all within normal variance for Gravity Falls now. I'm reasonably certain that whatever Bill did blocked the potential leakage from the Nightmare Realm. The gold bugs aren't even showing up."

"Good news. So ya gonna dynamite the statue?" Stan asked.

Ford frowned. "I . . . think not. It should be inert now, but . . . well, let's try to check. Dipper, are you in contact with Bill Cipher in any way?"

"Don't know," Dipper said. "It just, you know, comes and goes."

"Would you mind going into the Mindscape and seeing if he's there? I need to talk to him if he is."

"Man, don't make Dip do that!" Wendy said, taking Dipper's hand.

"No, it's all right," Dipper said. "I'm not afraid of Bill. I don't think he'd hurt me. I think now . . . now I can trust him."

Mabel, lying on the sofa with Tripper on her stomach, asked, "Hey, Tripper, you think Brobro should try to talk to the weird triangle guy?"

The dog raised his right front paw.

"Survey says go for it!" Mabel announced, hugging the dog. "Oh, I love you so much!"

So Ford turned out the lights, Wendy sat holding Dipper's hand, and he used autohypnosis to dive down into the Mindscape, that monochromatic, distorted realm of dreams good and bad.

"Bill?" he asked in a black-and-white, off-kilter version of the parlor. He seemed to be alone at first.

And then a form shimmered into view and a strangely subdued voice answered him: "Here, Pine Tree. Glad to see you survived the operation I performed."

"Yeah, thanks for that. What did you do?"

"Saved the nice little doggy. But I had to take some of your life energy and some of Mabel's to kick-start him. It's OK, you meat bags regenerate. Just takes a little time. What's the occasion for the visit?"

Dipper had been wrong in doubting that Cipher would manifest as his old self. He saw a shadowy, transparent form of the triangle guy. But then, Dipper had meant they'd never see him in daylight again, not in the real world, not as a triangle with a top hat and bow tie. "My Great-Uncle Ford wants to ask you some questions."

"Old Fordsy. Nosy Fordsy."

"Will you talk to him?"

After a pause, Bill countered, "Will you be the telephone?"

OK, it involved a kind of possession. Or at least mind-share. But Dipper had said he could trust Cipher, so—

"Do it," Dipper said before going to sleep.

Stanford jumped a little when Dipper opened his eyes—normal pupils, though—and said in a close approximation of Bill's voice, "Yello? This thing on? Wave if you can't hear me! Hiya, Sixer! How's the weirdness count around that handsome statue?"

"It's . . . well within normal range," Ford said. "Am I speaking to Bill Cipher?"

"Yeah, but so far it's been a really boring conversation, Fordsy. Hiya, Red! The Dipster's a lucky guy, you know? OK, Fordsy, I can't hold onto this instrument for very long, so quick now, what do you want to know?"

"Are your—friends—truly out of our dimension now?"

"Sixer," the Cipher voice said in a taunting, teasing way, "since when did I have _friends_?" He gave his insane laugh, then said, "Tell ya what, let's call 'em fiends. Show a little disrespect! And the answer is, none of them are in this or any nearby parallel universe. They've all gone home. I sent 'em to bed without their super."

"Supper," Stan automatically corrected.

Dipper cackled again in Bill's voice. "Super as in _powers_ , Stanley! In their own realms, they got no magic of their own. In other words, they can't come back. You're looking well, Stanley. How's that old right hook?"

"Trust me, you don't wanna find out," Stan growled.

"Please, focus," Ford said urgently. "Bill, tell me: will you swear—by—by the Axolotl—that all of the, ah, fiends are back in their own dimensions?"

Dipper raised his right hand. "I do. They can't return to here or the Nightmare Realm on their own. That's the truth. And I don't know if old Frilly judges that a good thing or a bad thing. This whole morality mess is so confusing!" He waggled his hand. "Hey, cool, lookit, five whole fingers! Way to go, Dipper! You grew a pair! Of pinkies! Ah-ha-ha-ha!"

"Bipper?" Mabel asked in a small voice.

Dipper's body stopped wiggling its fingers. A big grin spread over his face. "Oh, I remember that old pet name! Shooting Star. Don't think I've forgotten being tickled, either. Or hit in the face with kittens! Ooh, and how you decorated your prison bubble. You're a really warped girl. That's what I love about you."

"Thanks for saving Tripper," she said softly. "And that was _definitely_ a good thing."

"Aw. I—I don't know what to say. Wow, gang, a first! Oops, I'm losing contact—real quick, they're gone, Gravity Falls is safe from them, but there's a lot of other bizarre junk round here, so stay on your toes, and buy goooooooollllld."

Dipper slumped, then straightened, flailing his arms. "Waugghh!"

"Easy man," Wendy said, hugging him.

"Whoa," Dipper said, blinking. "That—I felt like—that was—did I do it? Did he come through?"

"Yeah, in spades," Grunkle Stan said sourly. "Trust him if you wanna. Me, I'll never forgive him for messin' with the family."

* * *

Soos returned and they opened the Shack for business and got a few dozen tourists, not as many as usual. Three of the black-suited Agency guys came in, looked around, bought a few souvenirs, and one of them tried to talk Wendy into going out with him. He got nowhere.

Dipper, Mabel, and Tripper were stashed in the attic, where it was quiet. Dipper and Mabel ate what the doctor recommended, drank lots of liquids, and dozed on and off. When they woke and got bored, they played board games on the floor, with Tripper looking on intelligently.

"This is like we're twelve again," Dipper said.

"Feels nice, Brobro," Mabel replied. "B-five. Hah! King me!"

"Mabel," Dipper said, "we're playing _Battleship_."

All through the afternoon, Wendy and Teek kept popping in to see if they needed or wanted anything. "Smooches would be nice," Mabel told Teek. He gave her a few as Dipper discreetly put the board games away and didn't look.

That evening, as a smiling Mabel slept with her arms around Tripper, Dipper felt well enough to go downstairs and see Wendy off. "Gonna go back to a mess," she said with a sigh. "Dad and the boys cooked their own breakfast this morning. I'll be up until midnight cleaning. Casa Catastrophe, man."

"I could go along and help," Dipper suggested.

"Nope," Wendy said firmly. She grinned. "Doctor's orders are that you go rest, so do it, man. I want you to get your full strength back quick. There's still some summer left, and you're really gonna need it."

"Need it for what?" he asked her with a smile.

She took him in her arms and showed him.

* * *

 _The End_


End file.
